SOURCE: "Elizabethan Romance: The Example of Prose Fiction," in ELH, Vol. 49, No. 2, Summer, 1982, pp. 287-99.

In the essay below, Hamilton focuses on Robert Greene's Menaphon as he examines the characteristics of late-sixteenth-century English prose romances.

I

Contemporary critical discussion of romance centers chiefly on poetry, drama, and the novel, that is, on the learned literary tradition. The most notable theorizer of the genre and the one who has done most to democratize that tradition, Northrop Frye, refers in his Secular Scripture chiefly to the major Greek romances by Heliodorus and Apuleius and to the English romances by Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Scott, and Morris. In her Inescapable Romance, Patricia Parker examines the poetics of romance from Ariosto to Stevens, and even Frederic Jameson illustrates the characteristics of romance from the novels of Manzoni and Stendhal.¹ Yet romance is essentially a popular genre, being "uncritical," unlearned, and unliterary in the...