ABSTRACT

From the beginning to the end of his career, Shakespeare was drawn to romance story, especially in the form we call Greek (or Hellenic) Romance. The two kinds of romance inherited by Elizabethan England had remained relatively distinct, with Greek Romance telling stories of family separations, storms at sea, apparent deaths, and eventual reunions, all under the control of Diana or Fortune, and with Arthurian or courtly romance recounting knightly quests for love and honor in a primarily Christian world (Perry 50). By the 1580s, though, both kinds had proliferated, forming what this volume refers to as a “forest” or “sea” of romances (Newcomb, this volume). The proliferation was not only in manuscript and printed fi ctions but also onstage, with playwrights ransacking “the Aethiopian historie, Amadis of Fraunce [and] the Rounde table . . . to furnish the Playe houses in London” (Gosson, Plays Confuted 1583, quoted by Mulready, this volume, 52).