of
romance. Two of the novelists of the sixteenth century, Robert Greene
(1560?-1592) and Thomas Lodge (1558?-1625), helped to give to
Shakespeare the plots of two of his plays. Greene's novel _Pandosto_
suggested the plot of _The Winter's Tale_, and Lodge's _Rosalind_ was
the immediate source of the plot of _As You Like It_.

Although Greene died in want at the age of thirty-two, he was the most
prolific of the Elizabethan novelists. His most popular stories deal
with the passion of love as well as with adventure. He was also the
pioneer of those realistic novelists who go among the slums to study
life at first hand. Greene made a careful study of the sharpers and
rascals of London and published his observations in a series of
realistic pamphlets.

[Illustration: A BLIND BEGGAR ROBBED OF HIS DRINK. _From a British
Museum MS._]

Thomas Nashe (1567-1601) was the one who introduced into England the
picaresque novel in _The Unfortunate Traveller, or the Life of Jacke
Wilton_ (1594). The picaresque novel (Spanish, _picaro_, a rogue) is a
story of adventure in which rascally tricks play a prominent part.
This type of fiction came from Spain and attained great popularity in
England. Jacke Wilton is page to a noble house. Many of his sharp
tricks were doubtless drawn from real life. Nashe is a worthy
predecessor of Defoe in narrating adventures that seem to be founded
on actual life.

In spite of an increasing tendency to picture the life of the time,
Elizabethan prose fiction did not entirely discard the matter and
style of the medieval romances. All types of prose fiction were then
too prone to deal with exceptional characters or unusual events. Even
realists like Greene did not present typical Elizabethan life. The
greatest realist in the prose fiction of the Elizabethan Age was
Thomas Deloney (1543?-1600), who chose his materials from the everyday
life of common people. He had been a traveling artisan, and he knew
how to paint "the life and love of the Elizabethan workshop." He wrote
_The Gentle Craft_, a collection of tales about shoemakers, and _Jack
of Newberry_, a story of a weaver.

The seventeenth century produced _The Pilgrim's Progress_, a powerful
allegorical story of the journey of a soul toward the New Jerusalem.
Mrs. Aphra Behn (1640-1689), dramatist and novelist, shows the faults
of the Restoration drama in her short tales, which helped to prepare
the way for the novelists of the next century. Her best