Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624)

The purpose of the present volume is to supplement and complement Professor Donno's collection by making available in facsimile seven minor epics of the English Renaissance omitted from it. With the publication of these poems all the known, surviving minor epics of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods will for the first time be made available for study in faithful reproductions of the earliest extant editions.
Traditionally the storyhouse of minor epic source materials has been classical mythology, but inevitably, as suitable classical myths were exhausted, Renaissance poets turned to such sources as the Italian novella, or even—romantic heresy—to comparatively free invention. As if to compensate for these departures from orthodoxy, the later epyllionists leaned ever more heavily on allusions to classical mythology. Of the seven poems included here only three ( Pyramus and Thisbe, Mirrha, and The Scourge ) are based on a classical source (Ovid's Metamorphoses ). Of the remaining four tales, two are drawn from Bandello apparently by way of Painter, and the last two ( Philos and Licia, Amos and Laura ), though greatly indebted to Hero and Leander overall, seem not to have drawn their characters or actions directly from either a classical or more contemporary source. These last two poems, then, from a Renaissance point of view, are comparatively free inventions. But both, and especially Philos and Licia , are a tissue of allusions to classical mythology.
The average length of these, like other Renaissance minor epics, is about 900 lines. Although the length of Renaissance minor epics is not rigidly prescribed, it is noteworthy that several of these poems have almost the same number of lines. Philos and Licia, Mirrha, and Hiren, for example, running to about 900 lines, vary in length by no more than 16 lines. ( Amos and Laura, however, the shortest with about 300 lines, is some 650 lines shorter than The Scourge, the longest, with about 950.)
Nothing of note has been turned up with regard to the first and only early edition of Lynche's Dom Diego and Ginevra (1596).