ABSTRACT
Greene and Sidney flank Heliodoran romance's entrance into Elizabethan prose fiction. The aristocrat and the hack make an odd pair. Sidney was the presumptive, if ultimately disappointed, heir of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and for a time the focus of Protestant hopes at court. 1 Greene was a self-made man whose family origins remain in doubt.2 They both attended university, but Sidney left Christ Church, Oxford, without a degree, while Greene graduated from St. John's, Cambridge, and went on to receive Master of Arts degrees from both universities.3 Greene was an urban figure, and Sidney, while living in both court and country, wrote primarily in the country.4 In literary terms, they shared a taste for
Heliodorus, but had different ideas about how his genre should operate. Their different understandings of passivity and heroism define the field within which Elizabethan prose romance developed. Greene embraced the romance passivity Sidney doggedly resisted.
