ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates that the circular plot of the Renaissance pastoral romance routinely explores, through the movement of the hero, a young man or woman's transition from adolescence to adulthood. It examines six male-authored romances—four male-heroed and two female-heroed—which will be seen to exemplify a pattern characteristic of a gender-determined development. While female development, through the pastoral and in the Renaissance, seems to have been a less familiar subject than male development, it was not altogether ignored by the astute male author of the sixteenth century. Drawing on the fundamental archetypal plot, one can trace its pattern in variation in Greene's Menaphon and Lodge's Rosalynde where once again, though his flaws are more excessive than those of youthful callowness, a young man runs through a series of encounters with a similar cast of secondary figures to aid him and so "comes of age" into an achieved selfhood.
