Love, chastity, and woman's erotic power

Greek romance in Elizabethan and Jacobean contexts

Darlene C. Greenhalgh

pp. 15-42

in: Constance C. Relihan, Göran V. Stanivukovic (eds), Prose fiction and early modern sexualities in England, 1570–1640, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003

Abstract

That the Greek romance exerted a strong influence on Elizabethan and Jacobean prose fiction and drama, including Shakespeare, has been well documented.¹ Notwithstanding individual variations, the plots of the Hellenistic romance authors who were most influential in the Renaissance—Heliodorus, Longus, and Achilles Tatius—share an underlying structural pattern: a pair of youthful lovers meet, fall in love, separate, suffer trial and tribulation, and eventually reunite in lawful marriage. According to the classicist John J. Winkler, the Greek romances of North Africa and Asia Minor introduced "a quite specialized form of erotic story: these are love-leading-to-marriage stories, in which the necessary goal of passion itself is lawful matrimony."² The erotic stories that constitute the ancient prose romance genre include Heliodorus of Emesa's Aethiopica or Theaøenes and Chariclea (fourth century A.D.); Longus's Lesbiaca or Daphnis and Chloe (third century A.D.); Achilles Tatius of Alexandria's Leucippe and Clitophon (second century A.D.). Two additional romances with less direct bearing on early modern drama and fiction are Xenophon of Ephesus's Ephesiaca or Habrocomes and Anthia (second century A.D.) and Chariton of Aphrodisia's Chaereas and Callirhoe (second century A.D.).³ Typically, the hero and heroine of Greek romance persevere in a series of conventional ordeals (storms, shipwrecks, pirates, bandits).

Cited authors

Shakespeare William