So wrote Louis B. Wright in 1935, in his eminent study of Elizabethan popular reading which laid the groundwork for much subsequent scholarship. How true, though, is the story he tells, of a rising Elizabethan female readership craving romance?

In the first place, many others concur that the last quarter of the sixteenth century saw a ‘fiction explosion’. Much of that fiction is little known today, although in recent years it has begun to receive more critical attention. It can require some acclimatisation from the modern reader, since it operates not by the familiar principles of the novel, but in the fantastical, non-naturalistic mode designated by the term ‘romance’. It tends to be concerned, for instance, with the adventures of elaborately named knights and ladies in exotic lands and/or in periods of distant mythologised history. Robert Greene's Pandosto, the source for Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, is a typical example; it tells the story of the King of Bohemia, his daughter Fawnia and her lover Dorastus, Prince of Sicilia, set in some unspecified past age when perplexed rulers were inclined to consult the Oracle at Delphos.