THE EARLIEST Elizabethan fictions wanted to identify themselves as historical writing. English prose fiction had always been set in the past; witness Malory's Morte Darthur. Furthermore, the word ‘history’ had a far broader application than is now the case, and might in principle be used of any narrative without making a claim to its factual status: a ‘history’ need not have been historical in the 1550s and 60s. But in the mid-sixteenth century the need to lay claim to the name of history seems to have been particularly pressing. The stories compiled in volumes such as William Painter's Palace of Pleasure and Geoffrey Fenton's Certain Tragical Discourses do not just have historical settings; through a variety of framing devices, they seek to position themselves as ‘histories’ in the sense of belonging to a recognisable class of writing about the past.

Painter's preface ‘To the Reader’ begins by declaring that ‘nothing in mine opinion can be more acceptable vnto thee (friendely Reader), than often reading & dailye perusing of varietie of Histories, which as they be for diuersitie of matter pleasaunt and plausible, euen so for example and imitacion right good and commendable’. Fenton's dedication to Mary Sidney cites authorities rather than offering personal ‘opinion’, but the theme is the same: ‘NICEPHORVS an Historiographer of greate creditt amongest the Grekes, affirmeth, that as euerye knowledge of it selfe deserueth commendacion, so the discipline of histories is most agreable and necessarie for all ages, which the Roman orator Marcus Cicero full well approueth …’.