The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare. by Helen Cooper. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pp. xiv + 542. $125.

The introduction to this wise and wide-ranging book is as characteristically entertaining as all the rest. It opens on the need, in the 1590s, for a bear suit for a dramatized version of the romance Valentine and Orson, and with this Helen Cooper at once conveys in an easy and humorous fashion her serious point: the genre of romance lasted so long (it was "the major genre of secular fiction for five hundred years") that its materials, even when reworked, were completely familiar to Renaissance audiences. When they read the Faerie Queene or watched a Shakespeare play, they did so conditioned, not just by a grounding in classical literature or an acquaintance with contemporary European writing, but by a thorough knowledge of romance stories and their trajectories, which enabled them better to appreciate what the reviser, whether poet or dramatist, was doing. Cooper's book aims to restore to us that audience's degree of knowledge.

Judith Weiss
Robinson College, Cambridge