Barnabe Riche, His Farewell to Military Profession (PUBLICATIONS OF THE BARNABE RICHE SOCIETY ; V. 1) - Softcover

Riche, Barnabe

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1895537029 ISBN 13: 9781895537024

Publisher: Dovehouse Editions, 1992

Synopsis

Barnaby Riche: His Farewell to Military Profession' is a collection of stories originally written in 1581. Barnabe Riche, Elizabethan soldier and adventurer, never left his profession except in a figurative sense to write of love rather than of war in order to follow the fashion of the times and to please his gentlewomen readers. Riche had a gift for imitating the Italian novella, and he created a collection that is arguably the best writing of its kind. Riche was a good storyteller. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he understood the importance of movement in the plot, social motivation, a direct style, and the elimination of tedious moralizing. Romance elements tend to create the archetypal patterns that associate these stories with myth at the same time that a concreteness of detail and immediacy of event tie these stories to contemporary contexts and social issues. The collection provided narrative sources for some nine plays, including Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, but this fact no longer overshadows Riche's importance as a writer seeking his own forms and sense of an audience and his own place in the history of Elizabethan literature.

Edition details

• Publisher: Dovehouse Editions
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1895537029
• ISBN 13: 9781895537024
• Binding: Paperback
• Editor: Beecher Donald