Mentz discusses Thomas Nashe's "The Unfortunate Traveler." Mentz uses the term romance to designate both an immense category of loss-wandering-recovery narratives and also the local phenomenon of Elizabethan prose fiction modeled on the Greek romances of Heliodorus, Longus, and Achilles Tatius.

Copyright University of North Carolina Press Summer 2001

Many are honest because they know not how to be dishonest.

-Thomas Nashe1

THOMAS Nashe has long been considered among the least classifiable of Elizabethan writers. The most famous critical pronouncement on him emphasizes the mystery of his accomplishment: "In a certain sense of the verb 'say,'" writes C. S. Lewis, "if asked what Nashe 'says,' we should have to say, 'Nothing.'"2 This unknowable quality in his work connects Nashe to the intellectual trends collectively known as "Renaissance skepticism." This umbrella term has been used to encompass a variety of trends, including the "academic" skepticism of Erasmus, the neo-skepticisms of Rabelais, Cornelius Agrippa, and others, and the Pyrrhonism associated with Montaigne and the rediscovery of Sextus Empiricus in the mid-sixteenth century.3 Nashe's

affinity with these figures has been emphasized by many recent critics of his work.4 Alongside his skepticisms, however, Nashe was a traditionalist in his recourse to formal models, including satire, diatribe, encomium, and, as I shall show, romance.5 The Unfortunate Traveler (1594), his only work of fiction, self-consciously joins Sidney's Arcadia (1590) and Greene's Menaphon (1589) in the thriving genre of Elizabethan prose romance.6 Nashe exposes strains of skepticism inside romance and by doing so anticipates both modern understandings of the genre and also its radical expansion in the decades following his death.7

Rosalie Colie has observed that in early modern England literary creation worked through (rather than against) generic types.8 This insight helps explain the sophisticated generic stance of The Unfortunate Traveler, which was at one time pronounced structurally incoherent.' Early in the text, Jack Wilton's trickster adventures appear to preclude romance, but Nashe fixes his attachment to the genre by concluding the story with marriage and a homecoming. The Unfortunate Traveler enriches the literary institution of Elizabethan romance by making explicit the strains of skepticism inside it.10 Connecting Nashe's text to the romance tradition gives it a meta-critical depth that is impossible to perceive when the text is awkwardly classified as mock-romance, anti-romance, or part of a rival genre like picaresque.11

"Romance," as the term is widely used, is a problematic genre-designation because it is broad and imprecise.12 The category proves valuable in the case of The Unfortunate Traveler, however, precisely because of its dialectic between transhistorical breadth and local precision. In this essay, I use the term romance to designate both an immense category of loss-wandering-recovery narratives and also the local phenomenon of Elizabethan prose fiction modeled on the Greek romances of Heliodorus, Longus, and Achilles Tatius.13 Nashe, I suggest, marries Jack and Diamante on his last page in order to align himself with writers in this tradition, most recently Sidney and Greene. In doing so, he secures a generic home for his story, and he also self-consciously extends the genre.14

In calling The Unfortunate Traveler "dishonest," I do not mean that it toys with genre in bad faith, but rather that it places strategic dishonesty where it belongs, at the center of romance. When Jack first meets Diamante, he observes, "Many are honest because they know not how to be dishonest" (306). This distinction between savvy dishonesty and naive honesty defines Nashe's sense of his genre.15 Nashe fills his generic vessel with surprises: a rogue hero, a courtesan heroine, a virtuous matron raped and mocked. The greatest surprise of all, however, is that these unorthodox elements do not preclude Jack and Diamante's marriage, the final plot-twist that makes the text a romance.16

Honesty, as William Empson has pointed out, is a fraught term in Elizabethan literature.17 In The Unfortunate Traveler, this term appears as central and problematic as it does in Empson's reading of Othello.18 Honesty denotes chastity on one level, but in Nashe's text, as in most romances, honest rhetoric is less practical than strategic half-truths and manipulations.19 Diamante is literally dishonest in the sense of unchaste, and she is rhetorically dishonest and scheming. She and Jack also fail the test of honesty in social terms. As Empson emphasizes, "honest" derives from the Latin honestus, meaning honor, both social and personal, and neither Nashe's hero (a page) nor heroine (a courtesan) measure up on this scale. As the narrative unfolds, however, their dishonest qualities do not hinder them from receiving the prototypical romance ending. Jack and Diamante become hero and heroine of their story despite refusing to toe the generic line.

More perhaps than any other narrative genre, romance defines itself retrospectively. Romance narratives since Homer's Odyssey have ended with marriages and homecomings. These endings redeem wandering and suffering by reconceiving the preceding trials as necessary to produce ultimate happiness. Romances are, in Frank Kermode's phrase, "end-determined fictions."20 The Unfortunate Traveler begins with a seemingly omnivorous amalgamation of generic modes but aligns itself with romance in its final third, when Jack's wanderings lead him to Italy. Three apparently separate episodes reveal how romance evolves

in Nashe's Italy: a pair of semi-allegorized houses define dishonest artistry, the rape and suicide of Heraclide demonstrate the perils of too-- rigid chastity, and Diamante's rescue of Jack shows the courtesan's versatility as romance heroine. The tale concludes with Diamante, and by the genre's "end-determined" logic she assumes final control. Italian sophisticate, deceitful wife, courtesan, and romance heroine, Diamante illuminates Nashe's complex understanding of his genre.

Part of the challenge of Nashe's ending is its sheer incongruity. Jack has alternated between punishing fools and being punished himself (i.e., between being the scourge of satire and the rogue of picaresque), and it is disconcerting to imagine him as the happy bridegroom of romance. Diamante also seems the wrong bride for a supposedly reformed English hero: an Italian who betrayed her first husband, she has been jailed, raped, and enslaved over the course of the story.21 With this pair as hero and heroine, the reader can never be certain how to understand the story's conclusion. In conventional narrative terms, however, the events are straightforward. Jack's marriage to Diamante matches Nashe's to romance; each union is ambivalent, unexpected, and, surprisingly, final.

That The Unfortunate Traveler explores skepticism and generic variety within the confines of romance will not surprise readers of Sidney, Greene, Spenser, Ariosto, or Shakespeare. Nashe, however, goes to extremes to make the strains within his genre visible, and by doing so he anticipates modern understandings of the genre. Recent theories of romance, including Fredric Jameson's influential (if transhistorical) notion that romances provide, "imaginary solution[s] to ... real contradiction[sl," have accented the genre's capacity to embrace internal tensions.22 Northrop Frye's pronouncement of romance as a "stable genre" and one of the four mythic forms of Western literature has given way to a sense of the genre as active cultural force and evolving literary institution.23 What Laurie Finke has called the "excess [or] superfluity

of significance" in romance-texts has become central to a genre whose surface simplicity conceals complex cultural work.24 Recent critics of the Greek romances have emphasized indirection and manipulation in a genre dominated by Providence to the exclusion of human agency. 25 Feminist criticism has examined how the portrayal of sexuality in romances contributes to the social construction of gender.26 Now that these theorists have discovered new complexities in romance, Nashe's text appears to mark an early exploitation of the genre's vast breadth.27

Elizabethan romances generally present their readers with a firmly providential plot and highly virtuous characters, with the heroines especially embodying chastity.28 Nashe's innovation makes these two aspects of the genre totally independent of each other. Jack and Diamante's actions have no impact on their final reward. They need not be honest because their actions do not cause their reward; their marriage is predetermined by their genre. Characters propose, but Providence-and romance-dispose. Diamante's genre-securing marriage shocks readers who imagine that a heroine must be chaste to triumph, but it also teaches them that they have been deluding themselves, because last-minute reprieves are generic imperatives, not rewards for good behavior.29 Nashe makes his story's marriage problematic not because he rejects the structuring principles of romance, but because he

understands them. Like Shakespeare, who makes the "not naturally honest" thief Autolycus contribute to the reunion of the kingdoms in The Winter's Tale, Nashe places dishonest characters at the heart of his redemptive plot.30

Diamante's dishonesty also typifies the tactics of the romance writer: he, too, is both courtesan (selling his texts to the highest bidder) and potential bride (hoping for a reliable patron-husband). Diamante's marriage and The Unfortunate Traveler's genre embody Nashe's career fantasies. He would reimagine commercial writing as prostitution in Have with You to Saffron-Walden (1596), in a passage that refers prominently to The Unfortunate Traveler:

As newfangled and idle, and prostituting my pen like a Curtizan ... well it may and it may not bee so, for neither will I deny it nor will I grant it; onely thus fame Ile go with you, that twise or thrise in a month, when ... the bottome of my purse is turned downward, & my conduit of incke will no longer flowe for want of reparations, I am fame to ... follow some of these new-fangled Galiardos and Senior Fantasticos, to whose amorous Villanellas and Quipassas I prostitute my pen in hope of gaine.31

Nashe refuses to "deny" or "grant" the charge he finally embraces. He claims not to want to write in popular forms like romance, and to do so only for money. Later in Have with You, he denies the charge of imitating Greene, but the denial focuses on Greene's cony-catching pamphlets and his prose style, not on his primary genre, romance.32 The phrase "prostituting my pen like a Curtizan" points to Diamante and her Greene-like tale of repentant rogues.33 These references recall Jack and Diamante's romance as Nashe's previous attempt to redeem a dishonest profession.34

In the last third of The Unfortunate Traveler, Nashe eschews the stitched-together episodes of the first two-thirds for a more coherent narrative form. Jack's arrival in Rome gives the story the retrospective shape of a quest. Rome was the second holy city in Christendom after Jerusalem, but Tudor anti-papist culture transformed it into a demonic city.35 The Roman episodes, in which Heraclide and Diamante are raped, Zadoch and Cutwolfe tortured, and Jack threatened by lustful Italians and bloodthirsty Jews, give the text a strange new coherence. Jack is under siege, and when he is rescued from these perils by his future wife, the narrative organizes itself retrospectively as the story of their courtship.36

Nashe's ending is conclusive in generic terms, but its tone remains opaque. Jack receives romance's reward, marrying Diamante and returning to his liege lord, but he has not followed the ethical code that usually accompanies this ending. Entering the magical land of Italy with nothing, Jack leaves with a wife and supposedly reformed morals. The text finally questions whether Diamante's behavior casts a shadow over the hero's (and text's) reformation. As I shall demonstrate, her dishonesty redefines and revitalizes the genre.

1. COUNTERFEIT ITALY

The earliest sign that Italy, Diamante's homeland, represents a generic homecoming for The Unfortunate Traveler is the scenery. Two houses together present a self-conscious exploration of Nashe's method: Tabitha the Temptress's house in Venice (300-1) and the summer banqueting house in Rome (327-30). Jack's previous rambles have taken him across Europe, but except for a few battlefields and a cider-- house, the places he visits remain undescribed. In Italy, however, Nashe renders the physical world in detail. He uses the conventional romance topos of the ideal house to explore his genre.37 The two houses elabo

rate Nashe's critique of artistic representation and carve out a place for dishonesty within the romance ideal.

Tabitha's house establishes the contradiction between outside and inside that typifies Italian artifice:

The place ... was a pernicious courtesan's house named Tabitha the Temptress's, a wench that could set as civil a face on it as chastity's first martyr, Lucretia. What will you conceit to be in any saint's house that was there to seek? Books, pictures, beads, crucifixes, why, there was a haberdasher's shop of them in every chamber. I warrant you should not see one set of her neckercher perverted or turned awry, not a piece of a hair displaced. On her beds there was not a wrinkle of any wallowing to be found; her pillows bare out as smooth as a groaning wife's belly, and yet she was a Turk and an infidel, and had more doings than all her neighbors besides. (300)

The contrast between a pleasing outside and perverse inside seems straightforward. Unlike Spenser's House of Pride, however, this house offers no means for the hero to recognize the evil interior.38 (Nashe's reader is not given the chance to try, as Nashe reveals Tabitha's evil immediately.) To Nashe's characters, Tabitha looks exactly like the goodness she mimics. Nashe's text has broken the link between human virtue and providential favor, so that sinners and saints appear interchangeable. The comparison to Lucretia foreshadows Heraclide's rape, and it also emphasizes how hard it is to find Tabitha out. She "set[s] as civil a face on it" as Lucretia, and the hero discovers her malice only by falling victim to it. Nashe's rhetoric warns the reader to trust nothing Italian and to assume the worst, and Tabitha's house reinforces this cultural prejudice. In this description, Nashe flirts with an absolute (neo-Pyrrhonist) skepticism he will later nuance. If all Italian houses resembled Tabitha's, Jack and the reader would be unable to trust anything, and Nashe's romance would be unfathomable.

Tabitha's house makes an essential counterpoint to the most famous building in The Unfortunate Traveler, the summer banqueting house in Rome. Criticism remains divided about whether this house is Nashe's true ideal or his version of the Bower of Bliss 39 The house specifically al

hides to Kalander's house, the first building described in Sidney's Arcadia.40 Nashe pays tribute to and revises Sidney:

I saw a summer banqueting house belonging to a merchant, that was the marvel of the world, and could not be matched except God should make another paradise. It was built round of green marble like a theatre without; within there was a heaven and earth comprehended both under one roof. The heaven was a clear overhanging vault of crystal, wherein the sun and moon and each visible star had his true similitude ... and, by what enwrapped art I cannot conceive, these spheres in their proper orbs observed their circular wheelings and turnings.... For the earth, it was counterfeited in that likeness that Adam lorded over it before his fall. A wide, spacious room it was, such as we would conceit Prince Arthur's Hall to be, where he feasted all his Knights of the Round Table together every Pentecost. (327)

The description continues for three pages and is by far the longest descriptive passage in the text. That the house belongs to a "merchant" links it in to the buying and selling world in which Nashe struggled to advance his literary career. The anonymous "merchant" never appears, and he represents the ideal patron Nashe never found: rich, tasteful, and absent. To secure such patronage would be Nashe's equivalent of Diamante's marriage, washing clean the stigma of literary prostitution. The merchant's wealth produces a perfect literary object, an ideal "theatre" of "heaven and earth." Everything inside is doubled: the house is "another" Paradise; it pairs heaven and earth; and it brings Adam and Arthur together. Recalling the "artificial heau'n" with which Nashe described Astrophel and Stella, the house sets a new standard for artistic representation.41

The key terms in the description are "enwrapped art" and "counterfeited." These words foreground the architect's dishonesty and simultaneously limit it. Ambiguity clings to the word "art" in the early modern period: art represents human action, but it can either complement or usurp nature's creative function.42 In Nashe's description the duplicity and artificiality of art are presuppositions, not fatal flaws. The house's art is "enwrapped" from the start, rather than falling from a pure state. The building mirrors Nashe's dishonest romance, since its very artifice - its manipulation of its own form - enables something created (a "similitude") to become "true." The apparently harsher term, "counterfeited," carried in the sixteenth century the same dual meaning as "art": to counterfeit could mean to imitate with intent to deceive (OED 1-4) or without that intent (OED 7-9).43 "Counterfeit" with this rich ambiguity complements dishonesty as terms of art in Nashe's romance. The counterfeit house reconfigures one of the standard topoi of Elizabethan romance. In Italy, Jack counterfeits romance roles from the earl of Surrey to Mark Antony to, finally, Diamante's husband. The banqueting house, like Nashe's text, is a skeptical revision that expands and enriches a generic ideal. The house's bivalent artifice replaces the inside-- outside dichotomy of Tabitha's house. The two houses clarify Nashe's effort to distinguish artistic dishonesty -the balance and nuance of the banqueting house-from the nihilistic uncertainty of Tabitha's house.44

2. RAPE IN ROME

In Rome, Jack and Diamante play out stock events from Elizabethan romance. These adventures consist of two intertwined episodes. First, Jack and Diamante witness the rape of Heraclide, Diamante is captured, and Jack arrested. Next, Jack escapes from prison, falls back into captivity, and finally escapes with Diamante's help.45 Variations on romance

topoi, these two episodes might be termed the Rape of the Virtuous Woman and the Escape from Captivity. They continue Nashe's increasingly overt turn to the genre.

Heraclide's rape defines the consequences of Nashe's romance for perhaps the only character in The Unfortunate Traveler who might be at home in Sidney's Arcadia. She is a perfectly honest woman, the chaste heroine Diamante conspicuously fails to be, and her suicide closes the door on ethical rectitude in Nashe's text. Heraclide's rape strains Jack's narrative powers, no mean feat given his eager accounts of massacred Anabaptists and the sweating sickness. The violent cliches of tragic melodrama mute his tongue, marking his progressive conversion from rogue to romance-hero: "Conjecture the rest, my words stick fast in the mire and are clean tired; would I had never undertook this tragic tale" (336).46 Jack's understanding of his story has changed; the tale is now "tragic," while he had previously called it a "fantastical treatise" (25i) or a "holiday lie" (261). Newly sensitive to emotional drama, Jack now calls his story an "elegiacal history" (336).47

Diamante is also raped during the attack on Heraclide's house, but unlike Heraclide's her rape goes undescribed and largely unremarked. Jack reacts to it with confusion and dismay, but with no purple prose. The courtesan survives on her own terms, flouting the convention that the story's heroine cannot suffer rape.48 Even Jack's frantic plea, "Save her, kill me! And I'll ransom her with a thousand ducats" (332), focuses not on her but on his conflicted position between self-sacrificing romance hero and mercenary rogue.49 Jack's trickster position, moreover,

is ridiculous because it is Diamante's money he offers the rapist, extracted from the estate of her cuckold husband.

Heraclide's debate on suicide recapitulates classical and early modern precedents from Lucretia to book 4 of Sidney's Arcadia. In explaining her decision to kill herself, she considers predestination from a mortal perspective: "[Why should not I," she asks, "hold myself damned (if predestination's opinions hold) that am predestinate to this horrible abuse?" (337). By holding predestination-i.e., Providence, the supernatural controlling force behind romance plots-responsible for the crime against her, she exposes the consequences of Nashe's romance for everyone except the hero and heroine. Heraclide refuses consolation and reinforces the misogynist canard that makes a woman culpable for her own rape. Jack's strange choices of classical parallels for this moment-Cephalus after killing his wife, Oedipus after killing his father (337)--further highlight her supposed guilt.

Heraclide's plight temporarily pulls The Unfortunate Traveler away from romance toward tragedy. She imagines her fate to reveal eternal judgment.50 Heraclide errs, however, in judging predestination by local human experience, and her error is crucially a generic one: heroines in romance (unlike tragedy) need not bewail their fates. Ironically, the rapist Esdras makes a similar mistake in assuming that his run of luck reveals "a charter above scripture" (333) that will save him from retribution. Each character extrapolates Fate's plan from temporary personal experience. Jack's sympathy, and the reader's, is overwhelmingly drawn to Heraclide, but her understanding of Providence (and romance) is no clearer than Esdras's.

Romance punishes characters who reject the Providential masterplot, and here The Unfortunate Traveler follows the genre overtly. Esdras will be murdered by Cutwolfe as belated revenge for his rape of Heraclide. Heraclide's punishment, however, comes much sooner, by way of a macabre joke. Her melodramatic suicide -"Point, pierce, edge, en

widen, I patiently afford thee a sheath" (339) -turns comic when her falling body awakens her seeming-dead-but-only-sleeping husband. Nashe marks the anticlimax by returning to a mocking style: "So, thoroughly stabbed, fell she down and knocked her head against her husband's body, wherewith he, not having been aired his full four-andtwenty hours, start as out of a dream" (339). The dead man's revival, another romance topos, comes too late, transforming tragedy into farce. The joke might seem to return the text to the trickster mode, but this kind of radical turn-from death to life, from tragedy to comedy-is the essence of romance. Nashe's chosen genre encompasses both Heraclide's tragedy and the comic farce of her husband's revival.51 Jack recognizes the strangeness of this moment and says, "Here beginneth my purgatory" (339). Invoking both more torment and the beginning of a reformed self, Jack eases the text toward the redemptive ending of romance.

Heraclide's rhetorical lead-up to suicide combines theological error with a misreading of the genre of her fictional universe. Her dilemma, however, remains the basic one in Nashe's fiction, as in all romance: how to endure the world's apparent inconstancy. Unlike Jack's witty aggression or the neo-Christian stoicism of Sidney's Pamela, Heraclide's solution is self-mortification: "The only repeal we have from God's undefinite chastisement is to chastise ourselves in this world" (339). She lacks faith in Providence, which she calls "God's undefinite chastisement," and this failing makes her unable to become a romance heroine.52 Jack's subsequent turn back to Diamante, whose rape appears not to have shaken her, provides an alternative to tragic self-mortification, and gives the courtesan-lover control over the hero and his text.

3. COURTESANS AND WIVES

As Constance Relihan has observed, Diamante is the only female character who does not threaten Jack and who instead offers him help in need.53 Relihan also notes that Diamante's appearance during Jack's imprisonment in Venice marks a shift in tone, as the trickster tale trans

forms itself into romance.54 Called a "courtesan" even though she gives Jack money, Diamante carves out a space for erotic self-interest in the conventional role of romance heroine.55 She is, as Relihan observes, "a source of consolation and safety," but she is only an "unlooked-for source" if the reader assumes that Nashe's fiction is absolutely different from Sidney's or Greene's.56 For Nashe's transfiguration of Elizabethan romance, Diamante's prominence makes perfect sense. Romances need heroines. Diamante exposes things that her exemplars hide, but she affects the plot exactly as a heroine should.

Nashe introduces his heroine through detailed allusion to his mostadmired English author, Chaucer. The "English Homer" gives Nashe a widely admired precursor who is also unconventional in his female protagonists.57 Describing Diamante for the first time, Nashe produces a dense series of allusions to two of Chaucer's unruly women, the Wife of Bath and Alison of The Miller's Tale:

A pretty round-faced wench it was, with black eyebrows, a high forehead, a little mouth, and a sharp nose; as fat and plump, every part of her, as a plover, a skin as sleek and soft as the back of a swan; it Both me good when I remember her.... With a lickerous rolling eye fixed piercing in the earth, and sometimes scornfully darted on the tone side, she figured forth a high discontented disdain; much like a prince puffing and storming at the treason of some mighty subject fled lately out of his power. Her very countenance repiningly wrathful, and yet clear and unwrinkled, would have confirmed the clearness of her conscience to the austerest judge in the world. (306)

Chaucer permeates this passage. The central phrase, "it doth me good when I remember her," echoes the Wife of Bath's ecstatic recollection of her sexual past: "But-Lord Crist!-whan that it remembreth me / Upon my yowthe, and on my jolitee, / It tikleth me aboute my herte roote" (D.469-71).58 Nashe's word "lickerous" is also Chaucerian, appearing twice in the Wife's Prologue (D. 167, 611) and once in the description of Alison (A.3244). Like Alison, Diamante has black brows

(A.3245-46) and a roving eye (A.3244). Diamante imports Chaucer's view of female sexuality into Nashe's romance. She embodies Nashe's stylistic double-talk: prince-like but in prison, "lickerous" but "scornful," "wrathful"but "clear" of conscience. Even her eyes are both "fixed" and "rolling." When Jack replaces her lost "subject," he switches his own status from would-be dominator to faithful ally, and from predatory trickster to potential husband and hero.

Diamante adds the sexual assertiveness of the Wife of Bath to the typical role of romance heroine. Instead of an orphaned princess, she is a magnifico's wife, jailed on false suspicion of adultery by a jealous husband. Jack diagnoses her fealty to her husband as lack of experience and instructs her accordingly, "Many are honest because they know not how to be dishonest" (306). This sentence, which I have previously taken as Nashe's comment on his literary method, marks in narrative terms the conversion of Diamante from mistreated wife to the heroine of The Unfortunate Traveler. Her erotic appetite is weak at first; Jack remarks, "she thought there was no pleasure in stolen bread because there was no pleasure in an old man's bed" (306).59 Jack, however, introduces her to "stolen bread." Jack teaches Diamante sexual dishonesty, and if her virtue had been due to ignorance, adultery transforms her into a witty deceiver worthy of Jack Wilton.60

Diamante remains mysterious to the reader. Due to Jack's narrative point of view, parts of her story, in particular her recovery from being raped, remain untold. When she appears, however, she frees Jack from persecution and poverty. After her husband dies, she obtains his property, her own freedom, and "invest[s] [Jack] in the state of a monarch" (312).61 Later Diamante betrays her mistress Juliana, frees Jack, and they "courageously rob her and run away" (361).62 Their voyage up the Tiber takes them to Bologna where they witness Cutwolfe's execution and then flee Italy. By this time Jack calls Diamante "my redeemer" (358):

she advances the providential plot that enables him to marry and reform.

Diamante is a thoroughly unconventional heroine, deceiving nearly everyone in the text. She abandons her husband, obtains his estate when he dies, and then robs her employer Juliana. She is raped by Bartol and seen by Jack "kissing very lovingly with a prentice" (347), an unidentified figure who may represent Diamante's excess sexual energy that Jack (and Nashe's romance) cannot contain.63 (It remains unclear whether marriage will satisfy Diamante; Jack is more desirable than her former husband, but she has acquired a taste for "stolen bread.") As heroine and courtesan, Diamante is more sexually durable and less chaste than any other heroine of Elizabethan romance. She plays out what her predecessors have only flirted with in rhetoric. A heroine not bound by strict moral codes, Diamante maneuvers through urban squalor to wealth, marriage, and a new home with Jack. Her pursuit of pleasure along with security revitalizes the happy marriages with which romances end.64 Diamante does more than simply insulate herself and Jack from a dangerous world. She gains independence, wealth, and escape from the Italy that had married her to an impotent old man. Her triumph makes Nashe's accommodation with romance seem an opportunity, not a surrender.

4. READING BACKWARDS

Questions of tone and sincerity nag the final pages of The Unfortunate Traveler. Jack's conversion to the "straight life" (370) sounds clear enough, but it is abrupt and out of character. Critics insist that true reform cannot be found in Jack's concluding statement, "ere I went out of Bologna I married my courtesan, performed many almsdeeds, and hasted . out of the Sodom of Italy" (370).65 If endings recapitulate the

essence of a plot, as Kermode suggests, this turn reveals the unexpected controlling force of the Diamante subplot.66 The marriage is Nashe's pleasing lie to the reader: harmful to none, pleasing to those to whom it is told, and conspiring with a providential design larger than local considerations.

Nashe's Providence, the controlling force of his romance, is finally so far removed from human affairs that nothing-not Heraclide's pious submission, Esdras's bold chance, Jack's wit, Cutwolfe's revenge, or even Diamante's erotic insight-can comprehend it. Some romances encourage the illusion that virtuous characters (or perceptive readers) can understand the providential plan, but Nashe disdains that crutch.67 Nashe interrogates Elizabethan prose romance by pointing out its internal contradictions while returning to the form in the end. His conventional ending justifies itself by its function: it makes Jack and Diamante recognizable character types and makes the text assume, in retrospect, a viable generic shape.

The text's concluding identification as a romance creates a problem, given a pair of hints that the ending may not be the last word. Romances generally conclude with the principals marrying, returning home, and achieving a full stop. Sequels are usually not possible.' Nashe calls attention to the unsatisfactory nature of his ending on the last page, writing, "All the conclusive epilogue I will make is this: that if herein I have pleased any, it shall animate me to more pains of this kind" (370). Jack's first description of Diamante also suggests that he may no longer live with her.69 Assuming they are not just carelessness, these moments cast

doubt on the couple's happiness (and the sincerity of Nashe's romance) by reminding the reader that time has not stopped after the final page. The competition between Jack's wit and Diamante's appetite for pleasure may make theirs a rocky marriage. The effect is not simply to destabilize the ending, but to accent the continuing place Nashe sees for tension within romance. In a last dig at his genre, Nashe adds a pair of hints that the story could begin again.

Nashe's divided image of romance would find distinguished parallels in the following century. A split in Nashe's imagination divides his female characters into Heraclide and Diamante, his symbolic settings into the banqueting house and Tabitha's house, and his hero's rivals into Surrey and Cutwolfe. The division exposes a strain between the ideals of romance (Heraclide, the banqueting house, and Surrey) and their antiromance reflections (Diamante, Tabitha's house, and Cutwolfe). The paradox of Nashe's ending, in which antiromance characters conform to romance conventions, exposes a bivalent interdependency between idealism and realism that would flower in seventeenth-century masterpieces like Don Quixote and The Tempest. Paired characters like Quixote and Sancho and Prospero and Caliban intensify Nashe's fascination with mismatched absolutes and unlikely couplings. Nashe's own achievement, however, remains the marriage of Jack Wilton and Diamante, who together become a mobile middle term that expands romance to embrace its skeptical undercurrents. Jack and Diamante, like Nashe, cash in on romance's promise when it is offered, but, again like their creator, they make sure they get their satiric knocks in first. They expose the naivete of all previous heroes and heroines of romance, and their dishonest triumph opens the door for the increasing selfconsciousness of romance and its interaction with more heterogeneous kinds of prose fiction.