Elizabethan Fictions: Espionage, Counter-espionage and the Duplicity of Fiction in Early Elizabethan Prose Narratives

Elizabethan Fictions is a study of the works of John Lyly, George Gascoigne, Geoffrey Fenton, William Baldwin, and a number of other English writers in the context of changing attitudes to fiction in Elizabethan England. Both the censors and the writers of the time were aware that the developments in Elizabethan prose threatened to transform the nature of fiction itself, and it was felt that these destructive capabilities might constitute a material threat to the security of the Elizabethan state. Maslen explores their violations of current conventions, their mockery of contemporary platitudes, their self-conscious stylishness, and their subtlety, and makes the case for these fictions to be seen as the precursors of Shakespeare's comedies, Sidney's prose epics, and the satires of Marlowe and Nashe.