The strikingly high number of reprintings of Ornatus and Artesia throughout the seventeenth century and well into the eighteenth bears witness to the sustained popularity of this gem of Elizabethan romance. Ford seems to have found the perfect formula: an eloquence of style, a sequence of complementary episodes wondrous in their inventiveness, but without indulging in the gratuitously fantastic. There is passion, sensuality, and devoted love delicately advanced between two attractive adolescents against a background of abduction, war and violence. Feuding families, redolent of the “star-crossed” story of Romeo and Juliet, again provide the circumstances hostile to love. Ford’s narrative is embellished with references to classical mythology and a rich Mediterranean geography traversed by the protagonists. Perhaps no other creation of the era more epitomized Elizabethan popular tastes.

The Editor

Goran V. Stanivukovicis Associate Professor of English at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax. He is the editor of Ovid and the Renaissance Body and has published essays on early modern prose fiction, Shakespeare’s drama and non-dramatic literature, non-Shakespearean drama, Ovid, early modern sexuality, and the Mediterranean.