THE PAMPHLETEERS and STORY–TELLERS

Greene: A short-lived but most prolific author, Robert Greene, followed Lyly’s style and the model of pastoral romance set by Sidney in a number of love-stories, of which Pandosto, or Dorastus and Fawnia gave Shakespeare materials for The Winter’s Tale; and then began a series of non–descript works, half–novel and half-descriptive articles, which give vivid glimpses of the seamy side of Elizabethan life. Much of his work is didactic and written in the Euphuistic style.

Lodge: Thomas Lodge’s stories belong to the same class as Greene’s sentimental idylls and are written in aneuphuistic style. His most  pleasing work is Rosalynde in which he retold the old English tale of Gamelyn and provided a plot and figures that required only to be developed into characters in As You Like It.

Nashe: Thomas Nashe, like Greene a fellow at Cambridge, and very like Greene in his short and merry life, wrote pamphlets like Christ’s Tears  over Jerusalem that are more successful than Greene’s in sketching London life and character. The Unfortunate Traveller is perhaps the first regular picaresque story in English, in which an English page has rambling adventures all over Europe including Germany, France and Italy.

Historical characters such as Surrey, Erasmus and Sir Thomas More figure in the story. The most realistic of Elizabethan ‘novels’, it nevertheless shows how difficult it still was to artistically blend the actual and the imaginative. This, in fact, is the common defect of Elizabethan fiction. [As an analytical portrayal of life, Euphues prefigures the modern novel; but it does this ineffectively, and its style marks it, as the Arcadia is marked, as a late attempt to reinvigorate an obsolete genre – the romance] Of all Elizabethan attempts at the novel, The Unfortunate Traveller does indeed show the nearest approximation to future. Nashe cared more for vigour than elegance. He gave up euphuism after his early works, and wrote novels in the style of a pamphleteer. His style is marked by the vehemence of feeling as well as his instinctive fondness for alliteration and compound epithets.

Dekker: Thomas Dekker, the author of The Bachelors’ Banquet, wrote pamphlets in the style of Greene and Nashe. In The Seven Deadly Sins of London he produced some good realism and a vigorous style. Other ‘novelists’ of this period include Nicholas Breton, Emanuel Ford and Thomas Deloney. Much pamphleteering of this period was in connection with the Martin Marprelate controversy between the Puritans and the high Anglicans.