12 - Guy as Early Modern English Hero

Summary

Guy of Warwick appears quintessentially a hero of medieval romance. Created in Anglo-Norman, translated into Middle English, with occasional appearances in the chronicle tradition, and an enthusiastic reception in early prints, his story follows a trajectory that is typical of a large number of early romances. He is unique, however, for the number and variety of further texts that he generated in the decades on either side of 1600, the period of the explosion of high Renaissance English writing when it might be thought that such a story was due for extinction. A handful of romances of medieval origin continued a vibrant life under the Stuarts at the popular chapbook level, and a number of others make a farewell appearance in the Percy Folio Manuscript of the 1640s; only Guy additionally makes a serious attempt to break into anything resembling high culture. His function as legendary ancestor of the Earls of Warwick kept the story active at the level of the high aristocracy, since the Dudleys, who held the title under Elizabeth, took an active interest in it – though that interest was pursued less by the Earl himself than by his more famous brother Robert, Earl of Leicester and the Queen's favourite. In some of its many versions, Guy did indeed follow the downward trend in cultural level, appearing in broadside ballad form in the 1590s and in chapbooks from the later seventeenth century; but alongside those, a series of further redactions offered the story, if not to the humanist elite, then at least to the public who were thronging to the playhouses or to touring companies, and to a readership who had at least some acquaintance with the writing of epic and epyllion in English. This chapter concentrates on two such texts, the dramatic Tragical History of Guy of Warwick, and Samuel Rowlands’ twelvecanto Famous Historie of Guy of Warwick; but they are far from representing the whole story. The play is the only one surviving of what seems to have been a flourishing industry of Guy plays; and Rowlands’ text itself became the ancestral romance for a series of further narrative redactions in both verse and prose.