ABSTRACT
TowARD the end of his life, Robert Greene renounced his "love pamphlets" as "so many parricides . . . for now they kill their father, and everie lewd line in them written, is a deep piercing wound to my heart" (12: 139),1 an extraordinary confession that vividly exemplifies the anxieties of authorship among the group of writers Helgerson has called the Elizabethan prodigals. But, while these exaggerations may be viewed as nothing more than a histrionic gesture of remorse for former transgressions, imagined or real, and generally characteristic of his "repentance" pamphlets, the correlation Greene makes in this passage between love, sexuality, and parricide has a striking resonance. It is a conjunction of terms powerfully dramatized in two of his most successful "love pamphlets," Pandosto (1588) and Menaphon (1589), tales in which the emotions of amazement and wonder evoked by the happy endings are momentarily jarred by scenes in which tyrannical fathers manifest what Crupi euphemistically terms the "darker human impulses" (59): that is, incestuous desire for their daughters, a transgression for which they are killed, either literally or metaphorically, and their daughters silenced-except for the words that reverberate beyond the text.
