The English Lovers (1661): John Dauncey’s Experimental Romance and Novelisation of Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West

Abstract

English fiction underwent a constant process of experimentation with genre and form throughout the early years of the Restoration. It is more conspicuous in lengthy romances written in imitation of the French baroque models than in the shorter, less complex stories of other genres such as picaresque, popular and didactic fictions. Young writers of romances endeavoured to adapt this foreign, elitist genre for a wider variety of readers in Britain by exploring new forms of fiction and attempting to upgrade and consolidate a distinctive vernacular production. This is probably best represented by historian John Dauncey’s The English Lovers (1661/1662)—a novelisation of Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West (Parts I & II)—that remains much neglected by scholarly criticism of both Heywood’s drama and seventeenth-century fiction, perhaps for its lack of originality. This article draws attention to The English Lovers as a prototype of the high fiction consumed in England in the early 1660s, even though the heroic romance would be superseded at the end of the decade by the nouvelle genre(s) that could be instanced by Madame de Lafayette’s The Princess of Monpensier, published in France also in 1662. The discussion aims to examine Dauncey’s narrative experimentation with structure, language and credibility, which to a large extent suggests a natural development of English fiction towards the novel, and also other aspects—especially the Orient and race—related to his novelisation of The Fair Maid in the context of the monarchical Restoration, when Britain first possessed territories in Africa (Tangiers) and Asia (Bombay) as part of the marriage settlement between Charles II and Catherine of Braganza.