The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume III. Renascence and Reformation.

XVI. Elizabethan Prose Fiction.

§ 14. Emanuel Ford.


The remaining works of a romantic kind present nothing new. Emanuel Ford’s Parismus (1598), and its sequel, Parismenos (1599), are obvious imitations of the works of Greene. The scene is placed in Bohemia, and the action is made up of the usual excitements of princely love and war; the general tone, however, is less scrupulously moral than is the case with Greene, whence Mere’s censure of Ford’s work as being “hurtful to youth.” It should be added that the story thus handled by Ford is reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet, and it is more than probable that the writer owes an unacknowledged debt to that dramatic work.   40