Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Transcription
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 ‘Not Knowing Their Parents’: Reading Chivalric Romance
- Chapter 2 The Progress of Romance (I): Kenilworth, 1575
- Chapter 3 Castles in the Air: Quixotic Representations on the Seventeenth-Century Stage
- Chapter 4 ‘Gentleman-Like Adventure’: Duelling in the ‘Life’ of Lord Herbert of Cherbury
- Chapter 5 ‘The Lady Errant’: Katherine Philips as Reader of Romance
- Chapter 6 The Progress of Romance (II): Kenilworth, Chivalry, and the Middle Ages
- Conclusion: ‘The Chronicle of Wasted Time’
- Bibliography
- Index
- Studies in Renaissance Literature
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Transcription
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 ‘Not Knowing Their Parents’: Reading Chivalric Romance
- Chapter 2 The Progress of Romance (I): Kenilworth, 1575
- Chapter 3 Castles in the Air: Quixotic Representations on the Seventeenth-Century Stage
- Chapter 4 ‘Gentleman-Like Adventure’: Duelling in the ‘Life’ of Lord Herbert of Cherbury
- Chapter 5 ‘The Lady Errant’: Katherine Philips as Reader of Romance
- Chapter 6 The Progress of Romance (II): Kenilworth, Chivalry, and the Middle Ages
- Conclusion: ‘The Chronicle of Wasted Time’
- Bibliography
- Index
- Studies in Renaissance Literature
Summary
When in the chronicle of wasted time,
I see discriptions of the fairest wights,
And beautie making beautifull old rime,
In praise of Ladies dead, and lovely Knights,
Then in the blazon of sweet beauties best,
Of hand, of foote, of lip, of eye, of brow,
I see their antique Pen would have exprest,
Even such a beauty as you maister now.
The opening lines of Shakespeare's 106th sonnet introduce many of the themes of this study. Fittingly, for a collection of verse much concerned with questions of reading and writing – questions about the power of literary discourse – the poem opens by referring to the poet reading a book. But what sort of book? ‘Chronicle’ seems to have been applied to a wide range of historical works (including a number of Shakespeare's plays) in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and so hardly helps us to pinpoint the sort of text being mentioned. As if aware of this vagueness, Shakespeare rapidly moves to narrow the field of reference. First we have the self-consciously archaic word, ‘wights’; next we are told that the people featured in this text are beautiful; then that it comprises ‘old rime’. Taken with the preceding clues, ‘Ladies dead, and lovely Knights’ suggests that when he describes himself reading in ‘the chronicle of wasted time’, it is likely that Shakespeare is studying what we would now call a romance, or, more specifically, a chivalric romance.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance , pp. 1 - 39Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2003