This book is a study of romance motifs and conventions, or ‘memes’: ideas that behave like genes or organisms in their ability to replicate, adapt, and survive in different forms and cultures. First developed in French and Anglo-Norman romances of the 12th century, they were transmitted into English in the 13th-15th centuries, acquired a new and vibrant popularity when prints of medieval romances became the pulp fiction of the Tudor age, and underwent remarkable metamorphoses in the works of the great Elizabethan writers. Although the motifs themselves remain the same, sometimes even down to v ... More

This book is a study of romance motifs and conventions, or ‘memes’: ideas that behave like genes or organisms in their ability to replicate, adapt, and survive in different forms and cultures. First developed in French and Anglo-Norman romances of the 12th century, they were transmitted into English in the 13th-15th centuries, acquired a new and vibrant popularity when prints of medieval romances became the pulp fiction of the Tudor age, and underwent remarkable metamorphoses in the works of the great Elizabethan writers. Although the motifs themselves remain the same, sometimes even down to verbal detail, the usage and understanding of them changes over time, rather as a word may change meaning: the book offers in effect a historical semantics of the language of romance conventions. Differences in cultural usage and interpretation emerge not just in the reuse of traditional elements in new stories but even in successive recopyings of a single text. These differences become more marked as stories and motifs move across authors, periods, readership groups, and changing linguistic and historical circumstances. The book concludes in the early 17th century, since the generation into which Spenser and Shakespeare were born was the last to be brought up on these stories in their original forms, and which therefore had access to the full range of meanings they could encode.