SOURCE: Waters, Gregory. “G. T.'s “Worthles Enterprise”: A Study of the Narrator in Gascoigne's The Adventures of Master F. J.” Journal of Narrative Technique 7, no. 2 (spring 1977): 116-27.

In the essay below, Waters analyzes the importance of the narrator in The Adventures of Master F. J.

When George Gascoigne first began to write his tale about a young, highly romantic lover and an older, more experienced married mistress, he discovered in the courtly love tradition an ideal frame of reference to manipulate for satiric and moral effect. By 1573 courtly love had lost most of its power as a code of social values, and the time was right for a detached, perhaps even ironic story about a young man's folly in substituting fantasy for fact in love. Earlier in the century, the Tudor Humanists had established the use of prose fiction as a means of securing moral argument, and...