The continuing currency and popularity of romances of the 1580s into the late 1590s and early 1600s is shown by Shakespeare's regular recourse to them as sources. His source for Twelfth Night (1601) was ‘Of Apolonius and Silla’ from the Farewell to Military Profession (1581) by Barnaby Rich, and his source for The Winter's Tale (1609–11) was Pandosto (c. 1585) by Robert Greene, authors we have already encountered in chapter 5 above. As You Like It (1598–1600) was based on Rosalynd (1590) by Thomas Lodge, another significant author of prose romances who knew and worked with both Greene and Rich. None of these sources would have been by any means obscure to Shakespeare's original audiences: Rich's Farewell was reprinted in 1583 and 1594; Rosalynd in 1592, 1596 and 1598; and Pandosto in 1588, 1592, 1595, and 1607. Many other of Shakespeare's plays, especially towards the end of his career, show the influence of prose romance conventions in more general terms. This chapter will consider two aspects of romance which especially relate to gender as they emerge in Shakespeare: cross-dressing; and the idea of romance as a feminine genre.

GROSS-DRESSING IN ‘APOLONIUS AND SILLA’ AND ROSALYND

In ‘Apolonius and Silla’, the emphasis falls upon female crossdressing as a saintly form of sacrifice. I mentioned on p. 90 above how when Silla (the equivalent of Viola) adopts male disguise to pursue Apolonius (the equivalent of Orsino) there are distinct echoes of the lives of saints Marina, Theodora, Eugenia and Margaret (also known as Pelagia) in the Golden Legend, all of whom adopted male dress in the cause of Christian virtue.