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    Prefaces to Four Seventeenth-Century Romances
    Prefaces to Four Seventeenth-Century Romances
    Prefaces to Four Seventeenth-Century Romances
    Ebook75 pages58 minutes

    Prefaces to Four Seventeenth-Century Romances

    By Roger Boyle, Nathaniel Ingelo, Sir George Mackenzie and Charles Maurice Davies

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateNov 15, 2013
    Prefaces to Four Seventeenth-Century Romances

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      Book preview

      Prefaces to Four Seventeenth-Century Romances - Roger Boyle

      The Project Gutenberg EBook of Prefaces to Four Seventeenth-Century

      Romances, by Roger Boyle and Sir George Mackenzie and Nathaniel Ingelo

      This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

      almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or

      re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

      with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

      Title: Prefaces to Four Seventeenth-Century Romances

      Author: Roger Boyle

              Sir George Mackenzie

              Nathaniel Ingelo

      Editor: Charles Davies

      Release Date: April 29, 2013 [EBook #42620]

      Language: English

      *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PREFACES TO FOUR ***

      Produced by Chris Curnow, Joseph Cooper and the Online

      Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net.

      The Augustan Reprint Society

      Prefaces to Four Seventeenth-Century Romances

      Roger Boyle, Lord Broghill, Preface to Parthenissa (1655)

      Sir George Mackenzie, Apologie for Romances,

      prefixed to Aretina, the Serious Romance (1660)

      Nathaniel Ingelo, Preface to Bentivolio and Urania (1660)

      Robert Boyle, Preface to Theodora and Didymus (1687)

      With an Introduction by

      Charles Davies

      Publication Number 42

      Los Angeles

      William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

      University of California

      1953

      GENERAL EDITORS

      H. Richard Archer, Clark Memorial Library

      Richard G. Boys, University of Michigan

      Ralph Cohen, University of California, Los Angeles

      Vinton A. Dearing, University of California, Los Angeles

      ASSISTANT EDITOR

      W. Earl Britton, University of Michigan

      ADVISORY EDITORS

      Emmett L. Avery, State College of Washington

      Benjamin Boyce, Duke University

      Louis Bredvold, University of Michigan

      John Butt, King’s College, University of Durham

      James L. Clifford, Columbia University

      Arthur Friedman, University of Chicago

      Edward Niles Hooker, University of California, Los Angeles

      Louis A. Landa, Princeton University

      Samuel H. Monk, University of Minnesota

      Ernest Mossner, University of Texas

      James Sutherland, University College, London

      H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., University of California, Los Angeles

      CORRESPONDING SECRETARY

      Edna C. Davis, Clark Memorial Library

      INTRODUCTION

      The four Prefaces here reprinted occupy a place in the long argument about Romance somewhat apart from the developments which preceded the emergence of the novel proper in eighteenth-century England. The secret antinomy in their authors with regard to the art they are practising is as clearly revealed by the compulsion to give Romance a new and, above all, a serious purpose as by the embarrassing discovery of so much that was otiose in the already existing forms. At heart they shared with Arnauld the opinion he expressed of Scudéry’s Clelie in his famous letter to Perrault. Que ce soit, si vous voulez, le plus beau de tous les Romans; mais enfin c’est un Roman. C’est tout dire.

      A further insight into their ideas and purposes is gained if one remembers the part they played (Mackenzie and Robert Boyle especially) in the experimental crisis through which seventeenth-century rhetoric was passing. All four works were written in self-imposed styles and were attempts to discover the nature of a common measure for the narrative prose their age demanded. Romance à la Scudéry was never indigenous in English soil. Even Roger Boyle had never succumbed wholeheartedly to its sophistications which explains why his book was so lamely sponsored by diffidence, dubiety and want of will. His language could never compass the idiom in its entirety nor could the matchless Orinda (who was Boyle’s friend) command as zealous or intelligent a following as that which crowded the Hôtel de Rambouillet. "Parthenissa is now my company, writes Dorothy Osborne, ... I am not very much taken with it though he makes his people say fine handsome things to one another, yet they are not easy and Naïve like the french." A long tradition, culminating in the Poetics of Scaliger, had established the kind of truth both poet and romancer were in search of and contrived a set of schema amenable to variations by even a mediocre talent. Broghill’s plan pays due attention to suspense and elaboration, without which, as Ménage said, the end would arrive too soon. He, like others, resorted to history for the balance of the parts and the establishment of vraisemblance in terms of what would address itself to the reader as representative and probable. These were now the commonplaces of the romancer’s art. In his Preface to Birinthea (1664) John Bulteel sets his face against those who can relish no Romance that is not forced with Extravagant Impossibilities. The tale, however told, should be limited to the scope of that predominant faculty of the Soul, the Judgement. And in 1665, John Crowne, amusingly enough in the Preface to Pandion and Amphigenia had maintained, with an eye to character, that my endeavours have been rather to delineate humors and affections, than to affect humorous delineations. Whole volumes filled with Phlegmatic conceipts and such empty inflations, inherit the Office of a foot-ball. But alas! while Romance endeavoured to bring the heroic into stricter, more reasonable consonance with its ordinary, realistic counterpart of everyday, the extension of range brought about by all the means of emotional contagion produced none but amorphous results. It was Madame de la Fayette who finally achieved the expression of

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