| The thirty-five year period from the first writing of Sidney's Arcadia (ca. 1577) to the completion of Shakespeare's Tempest is a culminating moment for romance in England. Both a high point and a turning point, it serves as an interesting platform for the study of a genre that is historically rooted, protean, persistent, and for some, problematic. It is to the last adjective that the “trials” in the title alludes, and the argument takes the form initially of interrogating this view of a belatedly “discovered” genre that is seen by some reputable commentary as a critical mirage. The discussion builds on the work of key romance theorists, Northrop Frye, Frederic Jameson, Alastair Fowler, and Patricia Parker, and includes as practice, in addition to the Arcadia, Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene and the late romances of Shakespeare often grouped with The Tempest—Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter's Tale.; Romance occupies imaginary spaces, Arcadian settings, wish fulfillment, endless quests for idealized objects—the Grail, the Blatant Beast—and subjects—Gloriana, Dulcinea—and is often characterized by interruptions of narrative and interventions of the marvellous. The argument evolves metonymically with the genre, from a specific investigation to a more general consideration. Romance in the seventeenth century is going through a process of diffusion from its simple, absolute state in the medieval—Don Quixote , for example, traverses the terrain between an ironic treatment of the chivalric and a romantic resolution of that satire—to the complexity of the eighteenth century novel and on to nineteenth century poetics, where in Harold Bloom's words we witness the “internalization of the quest romance.” This generic flexibility questions the notion of genre as immutable and fixed as it moves toward a more fluid and pragmatic model, and asserts an intrinsic connection between the alteration of generic codes and the creation of meaning. |
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