Geoffrey Fenton, Elizabethan translator and statesman, is best known for Certain Tragical Discourses (1567), a collection of Matteo Bandello's novellas translated from the French version by François de Belleforest and Pierre Boaistuau, Histoires tragiques, extraits des oeuvres Italiennes de Bandel (1559). Like his contemporaries William Painter and George Pettie, Fenton's importance to Elizabethan fiction is derived primarily from his role in introducing the Continental novella to English literature. His work is noteworthy for its elaborate rhetoric and strong didacticism. The stylistic elements of his writing, such as antithesis, alliteration, balanced phrases and clauses, and amplification, predate similar features in the work of John Lyly by more than ten years. His love of moralizing, even when there is no moral to be drawn, appears not only in his translations of fiction but of religious, historical, and political tracts as well. Although some of the works he translated, such as...