Displaying secrecy in George Gascoigne’s The Adventures of Master F.J.

George Gascoigne’s The Adventures of Master F.J. (1573/1575) is best known for its elaborate fiction of production and the scandal its 1573 publication supposedly caused due to being read as a roman à clef. This article considers the 1573 version of Gascoigne’s narrative and his 1575 prefatory comments on it in the context of Elizabethan intelligence practices. Interpreting the republication of Gascoigne’s works as a sign of success rather than as a consequence of censorship, I argue that at the heart of the complex narrative lies Gascoigne’s paradoxical endeavour to recommend himself as a government informer through his writing. Gascoigne’s display of the abilities necessary for an informer pervades the very fabric of the text, as he simultaneously puts into practice and reveals his skill at keeping, encoding, transmitting and disclosing secrets. Gascoigne’s contradictory performance of concealment and disclosure results in a narrative in which meanings are both obscured and partly decoded. This manifests itself especially in the narrative’s fiction of production, Gascoigne’s use of roman-à-clef strategies and his foregrounding of indirect means of communication, including the coded representation of sexual encounters.