ABSTRACT
The resemblance of the play to a masque is indicated on the title page of the 1584 quarto.2 There The Arraignment is called a “pastorall.” Our literary historians find the essence of Renaissance pastoral in the selfconscious contrast between the natural and the artificial.3 The poet with draws from the world to contemplate the problems of his everyday exist ence. Spenser and Milton meditated in a form which encouraged the projection of their ideal aspirations. I think both masque and pastoral are species of what Northrop Frye calls “romance,” a mood in literature of dreamlike wish fulfillment.4 Romance moves away from mimetic rep resentation of the “real” world. The unfulfilled wish usually appears as the goal of a quest, and romance plots in general have a way of suggesting allegory. The characters are general types, sometimes clearly fragments of a single personality. Their actions are often absurd or puzzling by realistic standards. A psychologist might call their behavior “compulsive.” The setting of romance is nearly always remote in time and space, a magic world where suspension of the natural laws is taken for granted. Roman tic narrative is apt to seem sporadic, since the author is never far from his besetting abstractions. He introduces meditations on matters like fortune
2. We have no satisfactory edition of The Arraignment of Paris. Except for mod ernizing spelling for consistency with other editions from which I quote, I have followed throughout the text of the 1584 quarto, ed. H. H. Child (Malone Society Reprints; London, 1910). Child, however, follows previous modern editors in num bering lines according to altered divisions of act and scene. I have consulted for line numbering, therefore, the edition of the play in English Drama 1580-1642, ed. C. F. T. Brooke and H. B. Paradise (New York, 1933), which is unusual in honoring the divisions of the quarto.
