The Inheritance of Texts in Early Modern Literature

Early modern audiences and early modern readers more generally seem to have been less interested in shock endings or surprise fictions than we are. A humanist education system, suspicious of novelty or invention or in some ways even fiction itself as morally compromised, taught generations of playwrights and poets that reworking translation and rewriting existing texts were the sign of the poet. Longer narratives in this period often had intermediate plot summaries suggesting that the pleasure of reading was not in the surprise and fulfilment of seeing how things might turn out but enjoying variations on an established theme.