The Early English Novel in Antwerp

The name of the Antwerp printer Jan van Doesborch is not much mentioned in histories of the English novel, but this chapter will suggest that it should be. ¹ If William Caxton and Wynkyn de Worde had a more obvious influence on a wider range of literary genres, van Doesborch and his translators—who included the Englishman Laurence Andrewe—may be said to have shaped the entire course of English prose fiction in the sixteenth century. This claim is of course controversial, but it can be sustained if one considers van Doesborch’s career both by itself and as representative of the careers of several Antwerp printers in the earliest days of printed books: from Gerard Leeu, who printed the much-imitated English-language jestbook The Dialogue of Salomon and Marcolphus (1492) as well as major editions of the animal fable Reynard the Fox (1479) and Pope Pius II’s De duobus amantibus (1488), to Martín Nuncio, who issued the first picaresque novel, Lazarillo de Tormes, in 1554 and 1555 (English translation c. 1568). ² As a prominent member of this illustrious Flemish dynasty, van Doesborch’s singular achievement is to have printed in English highly influential examples of every major form of prose fiction (with the notable exception of chivalric romance) that became staples of the printing trade for the rest of the Tudor period and beyond. ³ And in addition to the individual texts he printed, it seems to me that the relationship between his texts may have stimulated the imaginations of English writers of prose fiction for many decades after his death. We are fortunate in possessing a little evidence as to how this may have happened, and this evidence shall be considered, along with the historical significance of specific works of prose fiction, in the course of this chapter.