Ovid and Masculinity in English Renaissance Literature 9780228004530

Citation preview

O v id a n d M as culi ni ty i n E n g l is h   R e n a is sa nce Li terature

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Ovid and Masculinity in English Renaissance Literature

Edited by

J ohn S. Ga rris on and Gora n Stanivukovic

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

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©  McGill-Queen’s University Press 2020 ISBN 978-0-2280-0344-1 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-2280-0453-0 (eP DF ) ISBN 978-0-2280-0454-7 (eP UB) Legal deposit fourth quarter 2020 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Ovid and masculinity in English Renaissance literature / edited by John S. Garrison and Goran Stanivukovic. Names: Garrison, John S., 1970- editor. | Stanivukovic, Goran V., editor. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200297988 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200298232 | ISB N 9780228003441 (cloth) | IS BN 9780228004530 (eP D F ) | I SB N 9780228004547 (eP UB) Subjects: L CS H: English literature—Early modern, 1500-1700—History and ­criticism. | L CS H: Masculinity in literature. | L C SH : Ovid, 43 B.C.-17 A.D. or 18 A.D.—Influence. Classification: L CC p r428.m 37 2020 | DDC 820.9/353—dc23

This book was typeset by Marquis Interscript in 10.5 / 13 Sabon.

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Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: Ovid and Masculinity in English Renaissance Literature 3 John S. Garrison and Goran Stanivukovic

P art O n e A u t h o r it y a n d Embodi ment   1 Ovid’s Orpheus and the Soft Masculinity of English Poetics  23 Jenny C. Mann   2 Abject Authorship: A Portrait of the Artist in Ovid and His Renaissance Imitators  48 Catherine Bates   3 Ovid in Love and War: Pacifist Masculinity in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis 68 John S. Garrison  4 The Faerie Queene’s Muses: “Hermaphrodites,” Masculine Education, and Inspiration  86 Kyle Pivetti

P art T wo S e x ua l it y a n d Desi re   5 The Birth of Tragedy: Milton, Ovidian Masculinity, and Poliziano’s Orfeo 109 Ian Frederick Moulton

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vi Contents

  6 Ovid and Unheroic Masculinity in the Prose Romance of the English Renaissance  129 Goran Stanivukovic   7 After Ovid’s Sappho: Muteness Envy, Female Masculinity, and the Ethics of Mutability  151 Melissa E. Sanchez

P art T h r e e M at u r at io n o f Youth   8 “Of Youth and Age”: Ovid and Generational Masculinities in Ben Jonson’s Poetaster (1602)  179 Liz Oakley-Brown   9 Making a Politic Gentleman: The First Ars amatoria in English 202 M.L. Stapleton 10 Boys to Men: Fashioning Masculinity and Parody in the Ovidian Epyllia 223 Sarah Carter

P art F o u r T h e B o dy a n d R eli gi on 11 The Uncooked Goose: Ovid’s Philemon, Milton’s Adam, and the Transformation of Hospitable Manliness  245 Eric B. Song 12 Ovid’s Proteus and the Figure of the Male Jew in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta  267 Lisa S. Starks Envoy 287 Lynn Enterline Contributors 303 Index 307

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Acknowledgments

This book originated in a session on Ovid and early modern masculinity which we convened at the MLA conference in New York in 2017. We are grateful to the audience, whose probing questions and keen interest in the topic encouraged us to expand the initial project into a book and include other scholars whose work has shaped, and continues to influence, the field of early modern Ovid studies and the questions of gender and desire. We thank our academic institutions, Grinnell College and Saint Mary’s University, for the support they have provided toward publication. We are grateful to the external readers whose rigorous reading and comprehensive suggestions have helped us improve the book. Most of all, we owe Mark Abley, our ­editor at McGill-Queen’s University Press, gratitude for his judicious advice, and for his continuing encouragement throughout the process. We are grateful to the British Library and the Folger Shakespeare Library for granting permission to reproduce the images that appear in this book. Sandra Powlette from the Image and Brand Licensing Department at The British Library helped us secure the images and permission in the shortest time possible. The contributors and the editors are especially grateful to Susan Glickman for her incisive and invaluable copyediting. The production team at McGillQueen’s University Press made the process of publishing smooth and enjoyable.

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O v id a n d M as culi ni ty i n E n g l is h   R e n a is sa nce Li terature

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In t ro du cti on

Ovid and Masculinity in English Renaissance Literature John S. Garrison and Goran Stanivukovic

Among the classical writers whose works influenced the representation of masculinity in English Renaissance literature, Ovid occupies a central place. The Roman poet’s popularity and influence meant not only that his works were imitated and translated, but also that he inspired narratives about masculine aspirations, authority, and precariousness. In these new narratives, love and eroticism underpin men’s actions and determine their fate. Re-imagined in such a way, the Ovidian representation of masculinity balances the Virgilian model grounded in the display of heroic deeds and action in the public sphere.1 Early modern criticism has paid attention to Ovid’s influence on conceptualizations of the body and on the formation of early modern erotic writing, but few attempts have been made to illuminate the significance of his work in relation to premodern writing about masculinity.2 The influence of the Aeneid on narratives of heroic and imperial masculinity within texts such as The Faerie Queene and Antony and Cleopatra is undeniable. Yet, the “palpable influence” that Virgil’s Aeneid “exerted” on English Renaissance prose, drama, and poetry is concomitant to the equally palpable influence – in range, scope, and imaginative force – of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.3 The difference between these authors’ influences derives from the divergence of their methods of fictionalizing masculine interiority. The well-known opening of the Aeneid, wherein the poet declares that he writes about “arms and the man” (“arma virumque cano”), associates masculinity with military agency. By contrast, the equally familiar opening of Ovid’s Metamorphoses states that the poem depicts “bodies changed into new forms” (“animus mutates … formas corpora”).4

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Virgil gives language to heroic masculinity and masculine authority while treating masculinity as public. Ovid, on the other hand, unsettles the heroic male body. He shatters and transforms that body, the body that cannot resist the pull of an all-consuming sexual energy. Jonathan Bate argues that Shakespeare was “strikingly anti-Virgilian” insofar as Virgilian meant ‘epic’ or ‘heroic.’” Bate expands upon this idea by proposing that Shakespeare’s neoclassical “fabling” was “profoundly antiheroic because it was constantly attuned to the force of sexual desire.”5 English Renaissance literature is full of examples that test this assertion. While eroticism and heroism need not be disaggregated, Ovid seems primarily interested in the possibilities of the one in the absence of the other. This “antiheroic” erotic aesthetics of the Ovidian style does not stop with Shakespeare. It can be traced in other writers’ works and in different literary genres, as the essays in this volume demonstrate. This period of English literature evinces what scholars describe as “the disappearance of the heroic man” – a shift from heroic to romantic ideals and stylizations: a shift that can be located in the transition from the Virgilian to the Ovidian model of masculinity.6 In Arthurian romances like The Knight of the Cart, Erec and Eneide, and The Knight of the Lion, written by Chretien de Troyes in the twelfth century, the ideal of the knight was upheld by various tests to his heroic ability as demonstrated on the battlefield. In the fifteenth century a new form of romance emerged in English literature, illustrated by anonymous works like Sir Isumbras and Robert of Cisely. The main innovation in these romances is that “the protagonist … no longer lives at court in the service of a nobleman or a king, but rather now finds himself firmly ensconced in a rural estate.”7 The heroic man at the heart of these romances belongs to the gentry, Johnston argues, and these romances start to move away from the idea of militant masculinity and tilt towards a display of civic masculinity. Thus even before Renaissance writers became invested in representing civic and humanist ideals of virtue forged away from the symbolic battlefield and in the crusades, romance literature had already started to balance tempered heroic masculinity with ardent romantic masculinity. The medieval idea of the heroic, or epic, masculinity of the knight fell out of favour in the age of Elizabeth I. In the second half of the sixteenth century, a new form of romance emerged, influenced by Iberian and French romances that focused on the knights’ amorous pursuits; these often took Ovid as their model for their erotic

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narratives. During the reign of King James I, masculinity in literature became increasingly linked to civic pursuits. Literature now offered fabled versions of powerful, courtly masculinity. The “unheroic” or “antiheroic” (to echo Bate) element in Ovid’s writing about men compromised by sexual desire was especially prominent in English literary versions of these discourses. “Ovidian masculinity” in the English Renaissance therefore captures diverse versions of the masculine subject and masculine agency: products of an extensive culture of imaginative engagement with both the narrative examples and rhetorical strategies of Ovid’s texts in imitation, translation, and new literary creation. These works sought to imagine what a new male subject could be beyond one devoted to love, consumed by desire, or shattered by sudden loss of and separation from the beloved object. This cultural shift from heroic to unheroic, or anti-heroic, mascu­ linity meant that the literary topos of masculine virtue forged on the battlefield was exchanged for an emphasis on the romantic ideals of courtship, civility, and affective friendship, as well as that of achieving peace. The editors of a recent collection of essays on early modern masculinity argue that masculinity “is defined in terms of its contingency,” which most often means that it is “achieved and negotiated through acts of aggression.”8 Violence is not, however, an unmotivated contingency of the masculine subject, of his ontological nature. When depicted in literature, masculine violence is often dependent upon the amorous and erotic conditions of the lovers, or a lover, presented in individual narrative scenarios or aesthetic backgrounds. Masculine violence is also evident in narratives of male heroic agency. The examples examined in this volume show that the Ovidian literature of masculinity repeatedly repudiates violence as the sole determining trait of masculinity. Rather, these examples demonstrate that Ovid’s influence on the literary representations of masculinity was most often directed at questioning, testing, and negotiating the limits and ambiguities of male interiority, sexual desire, and selfhood. This book asks the following questions: Why did English Renaissance writers so often invoke Ovid when constructing masculinity as a fragile and permeable category? What effect did Ovid’s works have on the Renaissance literary forms with which his works came into contact? How did Ovid affect the male authorial voice? When critics search for answers to these questions, they enrich the complex picture of early modern representations of masculinity and

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the male body, representations that scholarship on early modern anatomy and medicine has not addressed.9 In the early modern period, masculinity was often defined according to “reason and strength,” as Elizabeth A. Foyster has stated10 – yet both reason and strength are subjected to scrutiny in Ovid’s fables. Ovidian poetry undermined this social idea of masculinity, producing literary fictions of love and sexual desire in which masculinity is depicted as unstable, ambiguous, and “anxious.”11 As this book demonstrates, the Renaissance reception of the Metamorphoses in particular and of Ovid’s larger poetic oeuvre in general provides evidence for how depictions of male identity even in its most precarious states offered persuasive and appealing models to the early modern writer. The burgeoning translations and literary transformations of Ovid’s works in the 1590s had a direct influence on changing representations of masculinity in English literature. In George Chapman’s 1595 narrative poem, “Ovid’s Banquet of Sense,” Ovid appears as the main subject and embodies both fear and fragility, aspects of masculinity that unheroic writing especially exploited. The erotic epyllion became almost synonymous with Ovid’s influence on English Renaissance literature with the emergence of the minor epic as a new genre inspired by Ovid’s erotic fables and, perhaps most crucially, with its vision of erotically charged, fluid masculinity. Indeed, this poetic type illustrates how Ovidian eroticism unsettles masculinity.12 In Chapman, the Ovidian instability of the male body weighed down by erotic desire is fused with the question of whether the poet’s desires will be fulfilled by his beloved Julia: “Thus sence were feasted / My life that in my flesh a Chaos is / Should to a Golden worlde be thus digested.”13 What forms do the self-definitions of Ovidian manhood take in English Renaissance literature? This question underpins the arguments explored in the individual studies in this volume. Can the Ovidian male meet the symbolic demand of the Renaissance for honour, domination, and power as granted to him by the nation’s culture and history? What occurs when early modern cultural ideas are intermingled with classical tropes? And what can early modern literary reception tell readers about Ovidian masculinity? Answers to these questions lead to an analysis of how Ovidian masculinity is con­ ceptualised in a variety of literary metaphors, narrative modes, and poetic registers. As the essays in this book demonstrate, the Ovidian man is one who questions and doubts, but never ceases to take for granted his embodied libidinal coherence and power. Such is the case with the

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young man of the Amores, who despairs over his temporary sexual dysfunction and its effect on his awareness of his own masculinity: “I am ashamed to be my age: what is the point of being young and male?” (III.vii.19–20).14 Shame is here rhetorically performative, acknowledging a brief disempowerment of the male body in a passage exploring the fragility of virility and youthful desire.15 Intriguingly, this exclamation comes just before the poem expands this moment of self-affirming softness and fragility into what Patricia Simons describes as “Ovid’s famous passage on impotence, which resort[s] to images of obstructed fluid and disused seed.”16 Most Renaissance adaptations of Ovid’s amorous stories involve young lovers experiencing the weight and trauma of maturing into sexual experience. Christopher Marlowe expands his version of Ovid’s string of metaphors about impotence in “the infamous” 17 Elegy III.6: Though both of us performed our true intent, Yet could I not cast anchor where I meant. She on my neck her ivory arms did throw, Her arms far whiter than the Scythian snow, And eagerly she kissed me with her tongue, And under mine her wanton thigh she flung. Yea, and she soothed me up, and called me “Sir,” And used all speech that might provoke and stir. Yet like as if cold hemlock I had drunk, It mockèd me, hung down the head, and sunk. (5-14)18 Unlike Ovid’s young lover, Marlowe’s speaker accepts his sexual dysfunction with a dose of irony, enough to indicate the performative nature of not just sexual prowess but also of masculinity. Writing about Marlowe’s youthful exercises in rendering, and expanding, Ovid’s elegies into English, Ian Frederick Moulton has states that “the 1590s selection of Elegies represents the male speaker’s decision to devote himself to sexual love for a woman as a fall into impotence and powerlessness, a loss of manly strength, and even of identity.”19 As Moulton’s essay in this volume demonstrates, John Milton too evokes the Ovidian tradition to imagine the failure of masculinity in the throes of desire. By exploring the ways in which literary engagements with Ovid create new fictions of masculinity, this book shows just how expansive and daring the contact between his poetic narratives and Renaissance

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literary discourses on gender could be. Ovid’s fascination with gendered bodies – both those of humans and those of gods who take shape as men and women – exhibits a deep curiosity about the nature of a body fervently desirous of another body.20 Ovid and Masculinity in English Renaissance Literature offers new approaches to the literature of post-Reformation England, attentive to the historical period as one where ideas about masculine honour, social roles, and erotic performance were in flux. Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical and de-historicized observations on masculinity, rooted in sociological and anthropological methods of analysis, offers a useful critical vocabulary. Bourdieu argues that “[m]ale privilege is […] a trap and it has its negative side in the permanent tension and contention, sometimes verging on the absurd, imposed on every man by the duty to assert his manliness in all circumstances.”21 The Ovidian literature of masculinity explored in this volume engages and plays with the notions of traps, absurdity, tension, and contention. The episode of the Pyramus and Thisbe playwithin-the-play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream memorably dramatizes the notion of male privilege as a trap, highlighting its absurdity as well. The laughable heroics on stage remind playgoers of the system of honour that functions as a set of societal and cultural demands on men, a point Bourdieu further contends.22 Literature shows, however, that undermining such cultural prerogatives was not the main goal of the Ovidian challenge to normative masculinity, even if Renaissance readers “were acutely sensitive to Ovid’s ability to unsettle our views of bodies and their genders.”23 Instead, literature turns to moments of failure to reconstitute masculinity in a range of different affects when Ovidianism disturbs it. The prominent position Ovid had in the grammar-school education system contributed to the effect his works had on the representation of masculinity in literature.24 The developing, vulnerable, threatened, and power-driven male subject of his poetry was the most frequently emulated topic in schoolroom philological exercises. As schoolboys, maturing towards manhood, memorized and recited passages from Ovid, they internalized the poet’s dynamic and vexed male subject. On the one hand, these boys “were supposed to learn at school how to sparkle in the male preserves of the Church and the Law,” but, as Colin Burrow suggests, they simultaneously “learnt these skills in oblique ways.” 25 That is, they learned by way of ventriloquism, ­imitating and emulating passages written for women. For these

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grammar-school readers, Ovid provided a “curious and puzzling lesson” about manhood; lessons acquired in the classroom tested their own masculinity and their adherence to heteronormative courtship. Writers who wrote new literary versions of masculinity would already have “well imitateth and honestly” (virtuously) rendered Ovid, as William Scott states. They would have done so by treating Ovid as “one of our age and nation,” a national poet, and even a contemporary.26 Such an approach to recreating a classic in and out of school occurred as part of reception of classical literature, enabling “civic productivity and patriarchal inheritance,” as Jenny C. Mann argues in our volume. Using Ovid to rebel against fair social goals, however, led to bold experimentations with fictions of masculinity. Several evocative themes emerge when these fictions are explored. Throughout these essays, the reader will see that the Ovidian poetry of the Renaissance expresses a profoundly masculine detachment in which eroticism disempowers rather than empowers the desiring man. When categories are disaggregated in the context of such disappointment, the largely contemporary markers of “gender” and “sexuality” strike the reader as either ahistorical or unrecognizable. Critics can begin to trace the “soft” masculinity inspired by the Orphic voice, the mutable and female masculinity of the Sapphic writing in English translation and in Donne’s love lyrics, and the queer masculinity of the male lover. The scholars whose work is collected in this volume showcase male protagonists avoiding matrimonial transactions and alliances as well as kinship relationships, just as Ovidian males refuse social and erotic domination in courtship. Sometimes they embrace a pacifist masculinity in reaction to the militant masculinity of the late feudal period; at other times, they manifest honour and virility through means other than chivalric deeds. As scholars recognize these themes, they also address the parodic masculinity typical of the male lover in the Ovidian erotic epyllia, which ironize and rarely celebrate male sexual prowess and potency. In such cases, criticism shows in startlingly new ways how masculinity is represented, constructed, and contested in literature. The body of evidence explored in this book testifies to the imaginative richness of Ovid’s influence on English Renaissance literature about masculinity. The aim of this book, however, is not to offer an exhaustive account of its subject. Instead, we seek to model an array of approaches by offering a series of connected case studies. This book offers methodological, theoretical, and critical examples of Ovid as

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a literary and critical animator, intertext, and subtext, intended to help critics ask questions and analyze historically crucial issues concerning specific instances of “Renaissance Ovidianism.”27 This volume offers a new lens through which to analyze masculinity in the Renaissance Ovid, building upon previous studies that have focused on women or asked larger questions regarding desiring subjects tossed around the universe by forces they cannot resist (especially because those forces, often uncontrollable, come from within themselves). While masculinity might come into play in such conversations, it has rarely been the sole focus of analysis. Yet, the inescapability of Ovid in the fashioning of masculinity in English Renaissance literature calls for a turn towards this topic, and for a new way of thinking about it. Considered as a coherent body of writing, the essays collected in our volume are linked by the authors’ common goal of exploring how pressure on the terms of masculinity can reveal the collapse of gender binaries, queerness in the fictions of manhood, and the protean form of masculinity in literary practice. This book generates new insights into both familiar and less familiar narratives by emphasizing sexuality, desire, and masculinity studies from an array of perspectives. In doing so, the essays build upon previous explorations into how various Renaissance authors drew upon Ovid’s work.28 This book, however, deviates from these previous studies by focusing neither on the broad cultural translation of Ovid nor on a specific motif such as the body.29 Instead, placing the focus on masculinity allows for case studies that work across such aesthetic and literary forms as elegy, epistle, and dialogue. The book combines historicist perspectives with philological analyses, and cultural history with formalist interpretations. The emphasis is as much on the critical and historical interpretation of Renaissance transmutations of Ovid as it is on the historiography of masculinity.30 A distinguishing feature of this volume is that it offers chapters on popular prose romance, a literary form imbued with the influence of Ovid yet, surprisingly, unaddressed in literary criticism. Other new perspectives are to be found in an essay on Milton and discourses of hospitality; the relationship between queer female-female desire and Ovidian masculinity; age and masculinity; and the triangular relationship between Italian neo-humanist writing, Ovid, and the shaping of masculinity in seventeenth-century England. This book seeks to fortify critical understanding of the representation of masculinity in English Renaissance literature, which remains

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incomplete without an analysis of Ovid. The literary works and translations explored in this book cover the period from the early sixteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth century. By taking this focus, the essays in this volume seek to significantly expand the extant scholarship on Ovid and sexual deviance, Ovid and the politics of emotion, the affective nature of the grammar-school practice of teaching and learning Ovid through rhetoric, and the formative role of the epyllion – the genre of the minor epic inspired by Ovid – in the English Renaissance. This volume also questions the notion that the Ovidian body assimilated in the form of romance “spells the loss of a new and different body” of “the self in its autonomy,” showing that the autonomous self embraces rather than shatters a bodily experience afforded by Ovidianism.31 Yet this volume does not simply “recover an imaginative understanding of [the] values” of the Renaissance heroes’ masculinity for “our own unheroic age,” as has been argued in the case of a recent study of masculinity in Shakespeare.32 Nor does it intend to expand the notion of “male bonding” facilitated in the process of reading the Ovidian long erotic poems.33 Rather, this book expands the critical vocabulary with which we examine masculinity as both embodiment and as a literary metaphor for social attitudes toward gender. In our attempt to capture the versatility of Ovidian masculinity, this book productively troubles the boundaries between male and female, between what scholars anachronistically call heterosexual and homosexual, between even same-sex bonds and heteronormative marriage and courtship, and between male and female poetic voices and lyrical subjects. The essays in this volume explore such Ovidian masculinities not only in terms of desire and sexuality, but also in terms of queer singularity and racial-religious inscription. Ovidian masculinity thus becomes both the “embodied materiality” of a literary text and an “analytical tool” that critics employ to interpret such a text.34

O v e rv ie w o f t he Chapters Any organizing scheme for chapters addressing a topic as multi-layered and complex as that of this volume must necessarily over-simplify linkages between the essays. In dividing the book into four main sections we offer certain possible paths into understanding the overlapping concerns of our contributors’ shared lines of enquiry; differing approaches to the complex web of connections drawn herein are, of

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course, possible. The book opens with a set of essays focused on the theme of “Authority and Embodiment.” In “Ovid’s Orpheus and the Soft Masculinity of English Poetics,” Jenny C. Mann focuses on a mythological figure that shapes early modern conceptualisation of poetic force. In doing so, she reveals how the Orphic idea of “softness” – which is an erotic and affective term as well as a designator of the content, medium, and style of certain poetic genres – conceptualizes the translation of Ovidian myth into vernacular poetry, thereby providing Renaissance writers with a poetic code of masculine force characterized by vulnerability and effeminacy. Catherine Bates reveals how Renaissance poets turned to Ovid for the figuration of a subjectivity “castrated” and in crisis. Her essay explores the way Gascoigne, Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare counterintuitively locate in Ovid’s castrated subjects a model for their own poetic praxes: a model that – in declining more culturally approved examples of the writing subject as heroic, masterly, and male – proved uniquely eloquent and productive. Shifting our attention to Shakespeare’s engagement with Ovidian myth in Venus and Adonis, John S. Garrison considers another alternative to the martial masculine ideal as he draws attention to a lesser-studied subplot in his epyllion: the tempering of Mars. This essay uncovers how Shakespeare’s re-imagining of a scene from the Metamorphoses allows the poet to portray a paradigm for how the rejection of martial endeavours might be aligned with robust claims to idealized manhood. In his essay on the figure of the muse, Kyle Pivetti closely examines Natale Conti’s Mythologies as an influence upon Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. As Pivetti shows, Conti collects Ovidian narratives that reappear in Spenser’s epic, and Conti treats those stories as allegories for masculine wisdom. This chapter elucidates how Spenser’s Ovidian muses undermine masculine virtue while the hermaphrodite emerges as an inspirational figure that collapses genders into a vacillating whole. The second section of the book, entitled “Sexuality and Desire,” centres on narratives that deploy Ovid in order to make sense of the effects of erotic longing on the male subject. Ian Frederick Moulton first returns our attention to Orpheus and to John Milton, examining how the early modern poet engages with the Ovidian tradition to articulate a male homoerotic desire that lies at the centre of a powerful nexus of love, poetic eloquence, violence, and death. Milton considers alternating versions of an idealized poet, Moulton shows, placing Ovid and his paradigmatic poet-figure at the heart of his

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re-evaluation of the male poetic voice. Next, in “Ovid and Unheroic Masculinity in the Prose Romance of the English Renaissance,” Goran Stanivukovic recuperates the understudied yet vital literary form of the prose romance, in which storytelling motifs and rhetorical structures are drawn from Ovid’s Heroides, The Amores, The Art of Love, and the Metamorphoses. His analysis illuminates how early modern writers use Ovid’s flawed, imperfect, and sometimes shattered masculinity in their own commentaries on, and dissident constructions of, romantic pursuits in neo-chivalric narratives, showcasing a new kind of hero appropriate to a new age. Melissa E. Sanchez, in “After Ovid’s Sappho: Muteness Envy, Female Masculinity, and the Ethics of Mutability,” considers the implications of Ovid’s Heroides, and particularly the epistle from Sappho to Phaon, for the relationship between victimization and masculinity. Taking John Donne’s poem “Sappho and Philaenis” as the primary text for her analysis, Sanchez argues that Ovid’s classical model of masculine envy, embodied in the figure of Apollo from the Metamorphoses, recurs in the Heroides, where it is expanded to embody a more fluid dynamic of sexual, gendered, and poetic desire, as well as authority. Donne takes up this complex model of Ovidian masculinity to imagine masculine envy in his poem. The subsequent chapters collectively address the “Maturation of Youth,” introduced by Liz Oakley-Brown’s exploration of Ben Jonson’s Poetaster (1602). She examines how Jonson portrays Marcus Ovid and Publius Ovid – Ovid senior and junior, respectively – who were “privately acted in Blacke Friers, by the children of her Majesties Chapell.” This essay evocatively shows how Jonson aligned the classical poet with idealized masculinity, framed in contrast to both maturing and elderly vernacular masculinities in the final decade of Tudor rule. The next two essays pursue different lines of enquiry into Ovid’s role in the “fashioning” of young gentlemen in Renaissance England. M.L. Stapleton looks at the first substantial English translation of Ovid’s Ars amatoria. Wynkyn de Worde’s 1513 schoolroom text, an Erasmian humanist enterprise that foretells the pedagogical theory of double translation, offers a curious model for shaping young schoolboys into adult male readers: the Ars amatoria was notorious from its initial circulation as a cynical and satiric primer for sexual seduction, and its author was consequently banished for immorality by his emperor. Yet Stapleton’s chapter introduces a theme present throughout this volume: the idea that many of Ovid’s texts share with the

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English Renaissance culture a preoccupation with the masculinity and manhood of young men. The final essay in this section, Sarah Carter’s “Boys to Men: Fashioning Masculinity and Parody in the Ovidian Epyllia,” continues this theme. Carter examines the tension between the culturally prescriptive assertion of appropriate gender roles in the epyllia and the genre’s self-consciousness, irony, eroticism, and parodic and intertextual nature. Discussing a range of canonical authors, Carter illuminates the pedagogical intent of the moral guidance found in the epyllia. Mature masculinity is achieved by one able to rewrite Ovidian poetry and mythology to perpetuate the cultural interests of his own time, and only by reading such works through an intertextual lens can their participation in the discourse of the formation of “appropriate” masculinity be fully explored. The final section takes “The Body and Religion” as its focus. The first chapter is Eric B. Song’s “The Uncooked Goose: Ovid’s Philemon, Milton’s Adam, and the Transformation of Hospitable Manliness,” which centres on the original man in the Christian tradition: Adam. Song traces the significance of Ovid’s story of Philemon and Baucis for Milton’s depiction of Eve and Adam preparing a meal for an angelic visitor. By showing how Ovidian precedent offers a bridge between classical and Miltonic values, this chapter reveals an Adam who devalues Christian masculine virtues of reproduction and sacrifice. Lisa S. Starks then highlights the often-overlooked figure of the male Jew in early modern literature. She shows how, in The Jew of Malta, Christopher Marlowe undermines his protagonist’s claim to masculine identity by associating him with Ovid’s Proteus, a figure frequently associated with male actors in the Renaissance stage. The volume closes with what Lynn Enterline terms an “envoy,” her final thought-piece about how these collected essays point to new directions in Ovid criticism and the study of embodiment in English Renaissance literature. The essays collected in this volume do not collaboratively produce a single elucidation of masculinity as it was figured by the deployment of Ovidian works in English Renaissance literature. They all speak powerfully, however, about the potentials and limits of Ovidian ­fictions of masculinity to be transformed in and to inform new discourses of sexuality and, consequently, to inspire new directions for studies in masculinity. English Renaissance reinterpretations of the Ovidian discourses of masculinity are both key to an understanding of historical reception, appropriation, and intertextuality, and crucial

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Introduction 15

to generating debate about the manifold ways in which Ovid had a hold on the literary imagination. Ovid, in many ways, strengthened and enriched the voices of many well-known authors of the English Renaissance. In turn, tracing the resonances of the poet’s ancient voice in the texts of these later authors make visible the complexity of the masculine authority that they claim or call into question.

Notes   1 Although writers of the English Renaissance do not invoke directly a ­dialogue between Ovid and Virgil within the same literary piece, Ovid “regularly calls Vergil to mind” to experience a human condition, as Michael C.J. Putnam states. Putnam draws attention to the fact that in the poetry of exile, for instance, Ovid “adds a dimension of personal involvement that the poetry of Vergil [sic] lacked because […] the poet himself apparently suffered no dispossession. Vergilian interiority […] is both absorbed and then dramatically extended by Ovid [in Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto].” See Putnam, “Vergil, Ovid, and the Poetry of Exile,” in A Companion to Vergil’s Aeneis and Its Tradition, ed. Joseph Farrell and Michael C.J. Putnam (Malden, M A and Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2010), 81, 80–106.   2 The most recent example is the volume of essays, Ovidian Transversions: “Iphis and Ianthe,” 1350–1650, ed. Valerie Traub, Patricia Badir, and Peggy McCracken (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019). See also Gregory Heyworth, Desiring Bodies: Ovidian Romance and the Cult of the Form (Notre Dame, I N : University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), and Marina Warner, Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).   3 David Bevington, “Introduction,” Antony and Cleopatra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 7, 1–73. For a detailed account of the range of translations of the Aeneid in the early modern period in England, see Sheldon Brammall, The English Aeneid: Translations of Virgil, 1555–1646 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015). Andrew Wallace, Virgil’s Schoolboys: The Poetics of Pedagogy in Renaissance England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), demonstrates the depth and nuances of philological engagement with Virgil in the pedagogy of the grammar-school system in Renaissance England. For an overview of Virgil’s presence in the Renaissance, see David Scott

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Wilson-Okamura, Virgil in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).  4 Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid: Book 1-6, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. G.P. Goold (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1999), Book I, line 1. Ovid, Metamorphoses, Books I-VIII, trans. Frank Justus Miller, rev. G.P. Goold (Cambridge, MA , and London: Harvard University, 1994), Book I, line 1.   5 Jonathan Bate, How the Classics Made Shakespeare (Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 2019), 15. Bate’s italics.   6 Thomas R. Edwards, Imagination and Power: A Study of Poetry on Public Themes (London: Chatto and Windus, 1971), esp. ch. 1, 7–46.   7 Michael Johnston, Romance and the Gentry in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 48.   8 Jennifer Feather and Catherine E. Thomas, ed. Violent Masculinities: Male Aggression in Early Modern Texts and Culture (New York: Palgrave‑Macmillan, 2013), 1.   9 For larger discussions about the construction of gender in relation to early modern understanding of the body, see Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA , and London: Harvard University Press, 1992). 10 Elizabeth A. Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex and Marriage (London and New York: Longman, 1999), 29. 11 On the anxieties that surround male identity in the period, see Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity. Consider also that Ovidian models may have offered a more powerful draw for literature than the popular one-sex model of gender which posited that a woman was a defect of the male. This model is the subject of scrutiny and critique by Janet Adelman, “Making Defect Perfection: Shakespeare and the One-Sex Model,” in Enacting Gender on the English Renaissance Stage, ed. Viviana Comensoli and Anne Russell (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 23–52. 12 On the epyllion and erotic writing in English Renaissance literature, see Elizabethan Narrative Poems: The State of Play, ed. Lynn Enterline (London: Bloomsbury, 2019); Enterline, “Elizabethan Minor Epic,” The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, vol. 2: 1558–1660, ed. Patrick Cheney and Philip Hardie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 253–89; William P. Weaver, Untutored Lines: The Making of the English Epyllion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012); Georgia Brown, Redefining Elizabethan Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), esp. 102–77; Jim Ellis, Sexuality and Citizenship: Metamorphosis in Elizabethan Erotic Verse (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003).

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Introduction 17 13 Elizabethan Narrative Verse, ed. Nigel Alexander (London: Edward Arnold, 1967), lines 227-9. 14 In the original: “a, pudet annorum: quo me iuvenemque virumque? / nec iuvenem nec me sensit amica virum?” Quoted from Ovid, Heroides and Amores, trans. Grant Showerman, rev., G.P. Goold (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1986). 15 See Ellis Hanson, “Teaching Shame,” Gay Shame, ed. David M. Halperin and Valerie Traub (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), 133, 132–64. 16 Patricia Simons, The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 250. This passage reads as follows: “When damned by charms the corn withers on the sterile stalk, and when a well is damned by charms, its water dries up; through incantations acorns drop from oaks and grapes from vines, and apples fall when no one has touched them. What prevents the cessation of my energy being due to magical practices? It is perhaps from that source that my powers became inadequate. Shame also played a part, for my very shame at what happened inhibited me: that was the second cause of my trouble.” In Latin this passage reads as follows: “carmine laesa Ceres sterilem vanescit in herbam, / deficient laesi carmine fontis aquae, / illicibus glandes cantataque vitibus uva / decidit, et nullo poma movente fluunt. / quid vetat et nervos magicas torpere per artes? / forsitan inpatiens fit latus inde meum. / huc pudor accessit: facti pudor ipse nocebat; / ille fuit vitii causa secunda mei.” Amores, Ibid., III.vii.29-38. The Renaissance associated these fruits with the different parts of the male sexual organ, upon which Simons expands. 17 Ian Frederick Moulton, Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 105. 18 Christopher Marlowe, The Complete Poems and Translations, ed. Stephen Orgel (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971), 171. 19 Moulton, Before Pornography, 106. 20 Victoria Rimell has demonstrated persuasively that Ovid experimented with the mythical lore by transforming and transcending the myths of the age in which he lived. In the forefront of all Renaissance reimagined representations of Ovid – in paintings, sculptures, tapestries, majolica, and literature – are the bodies of the men and women, sublimated in allegories and metaphors and exposed to the scrutinising gaze of the viewers and readers. Ovid thus draws our attention to masculinity and femininity as the main constitutive elements of the human world, and as the starting points for raising critical questions about that world. Consequently, the poetry of sexual desire “can be read as a constant battle to transcend a compulsive

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logic of the same in order to sustain desire.” See Rimell, Ovid’s Lovers: Desire, Difference, and the Poetic Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 5. 21 Pierre Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 50. 22 Ibid. 23 While Ovid is not the subject of Mark Breitenberg’s book about literature and embodiment, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), the notion that anxiety largely stems from failing to adhere to the social demands is an aspect of its argument about the “anxious masculinity.” Colin Burrow, “Re-embodying Ovid: Renaissance Afterlives,” The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, ed. Philip Hardie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 305, 301–19. 24 John Barsby, Ovid (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 3. 25 Colin Burrow, Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 43. 26 William Scott, The Model of Poesy, ed. Gavin Alexander (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 29. The OED explains “honestly” as meaning “virtuously” and “candidly.” 27 Valerie Traub, “Afterword,” Ovid and the Renaissance Body, ed. Goran V. Stanivukovic (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 261, 260–8. 28 Influential studies of Milton’s, Shakespeare’s, and Marlowe’s engagements with Ovid include Maggie Kilgour, Milton and the Metamorphosis of Ovid (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Frederick S. Boas, “Ovid and the Elizabethans” (London: The English Association, 1947), Shakespeare’s Ovid: The Metamorphoses in the Plays and Poems, ed. A.B. Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); M.L. Stapleton, Marlowe’s Ovid: The ‘Elegies’ in the Marlowe Canon (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014); Raphael Lyne, Ovid’s Changing Worlds: English Metamorphoses, 1567–1632 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001) and “Ovid in English Translation,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, ed. Philip Hardie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 249–63; Metamorphosis: The Changing Face of Ovid in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Alison Keith and Stephen Rupp (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2007); and Leonard Barkan, Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986). 29 Lynn Enterline, The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). See also Stanivukoic, ed.,

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Introduction 19 Ovid and the Renaissance Body, and Shakespeare’s Erotic Mythology and Ovidian Renaissance Culture, ed. Agnes Lafont (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013). 30 Burrow, Shakespeare; Bate, Shakespeare; Maggie Kilgour, Milton and the Metamorphosis of Ovid (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); and Lyne, Ovid’s Changing Worlds. Much of the most inspiring work in English Renaissance scholarship on Ovid during the past decade has strived to reposition the established argument about the interaction between the classical and neo-classical ideas of imagining sexual desire – by paying attention, for instance, to Ovidian influence on the formation of masculinity at the crossroads of classical and Anglo-Ottoman literary and cultural studies. Miriam Jacobson argues that Shakespeare’s erotic epyllion, Venus and Adonis, is “not primarily about a love that becomes impossible,” but that it “remediates Ovid’s version of a classical myth through two extended metaphors for Levantine merchandise,” the Turkish tulip bulb and the Arabian horse. These two metaphors operate as cultural indices of the erotic masculinity which Shakespeare foregrounds in this poem. See Jacobson, Barbarous Antiquity: Reorienting the Past in the Poetry of Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 116–17. Yet, for the most part the criticism of Ovid’s influence on the representation of gender and sexual desire in the English Renaissance continues to re-examine philological experimentation with Ovid in the neoclassical re-envisaging of the classical masculinity narratives. 31 Heyworth, Desiring Bodies, 5. 32 Robin Headlam Wells, Shakespeare on Masculinity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 7. 33 Bruce R. Smith, Shakespeare and Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 135. 34 Valerie Traub, Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 18.

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P art O n e Authority and Embodiment

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1 Ovid’s Orpheus and the Soft Masculinity of English Poetics Jenny C. Mann

Even among the most barbarous and simple Indians where no writing is, yet have they their poets who make and sing songs, which they call areytos, both of their ancestors’ deeds and praises of their gods: a sufficient probability that, if ever learning come among them, it must be by having their hard dull wits softened and sharpened with the sweet delights of poetry. Philip Sidney, The Defense of Poesy1

adde quod ingenuas didicisse fideliter artes emollit mores nec sinit esse feros Ovid, Ex Ponto2

The humanist language arts commonly describe eloquence as that which forges civilization and shores up the strength of the virile body, figuring literary transmission in terms of civic productivity and patriarchal inheritance. Humanist investments in classical culture shape such notions of artful language, with the resulting conviction that eloquence properly resides in the Greek and Latin tongues. The pedagogical system was designed to transfer this eloquence to early modern England, and in so doing, prepare generations of schoolboys to reconstitute the civic and cultural achievements of the ancient world in their own commonwealth. This educational program justified itself with the central claim of the ancient art of rhetoric: that eloquence

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eradicates barbarity and forges civil community.3 A corollary of this identification of eloquence with social stability was the belief that a rhetorical education produces masculine virtue (Roman virtus). This image of the virtuous orator-civilizer attested to the social and political utility of the studia humanitatis while also establishing the social stature and cultural importance of the man of letters.4 In promoting rhetoric’s socio-cultural power, early modern educational theory aligns verbal eloquence with approved forms of masculine gentility.5 Such schooling promised to produce and equip proper English gentlemen; however, as Lynn Enterline has demonstrated, the texts that students were asked to absorb via imitation frequently put considerable pressure on normative conceptions of gender and erotic practice.6 Early modern encounters with classical texts produced unpredictable results, and Ovid is the Roman author who most often provokes gender play and sexual wantonness in his early modern readers. The humanist conception of the civilizing function of classical literature informs the opening pages of John Brinsley’s school translation, Ouids Metamorphosis Translated Grammatically, and also according to the propriety of our English tongue (1618). In a dedication to Lord Denny, Brinsley justifies the publication of his translation of Book I of The Metamorphoses, explaining that it is intended Chiefly, for the poore ignorant countries of Ireland and Wales; of the good whereof wee ought to be carefull aswell as of our owne: vnto which I haue principally bent my thoughts in all my Grammatical-translations of our inferiour classicall schooleauthors. For that as in all such places, so especially in those barbarous countries, the hope of the church of God is to com [sic] primarily out of the grammar-schools, by reducing them first vnto ciuility thorough the meanes of schooles of good learning planted amongst them in euery quarter; wherby their sauage and wilde conditions may be changed into more humanity; according to the right iudgement of our Poet, which the experience of all ages hath confirmed. (¶2v) Printed beside this explication of the civilizing function of the classical curriculum is a marginal note from Ovid’s Ex Ponto, “Adde, quod ingenuas didicisse fideliter artes, Emollit mores, nec sinit esse feros. Ouid.” This passage translates to “a faithful study of the liberal arts

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makes gentle the character and does not allow it to be unrefined,” or perhaps, “softens men’s manners so they are not brutal.” Here the English schoolmaster and translator, writing in a vulgar language and living on an island disdained by the Romans as irredeemably barbarous, fantasizes that his culture will become the vehicle of civilization, able to reform the “sauage and wilde conditions” of those “barbarous countries” of Ireland and Wales. This toxic fantasy, whereby English writers convert their position from that of colonized to colonizer, is largely familiar to scholars of this early phase of vernacular selfassertion.7 But I want to dwell on the Latin tag from Ovid, which encourages us to understand this civilizing process as a matter of softening (emollitio). This association is not uncommon: it appears in Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poesy (ca.1579) as well, which speculates that learning will come to the “barbarous and simple Indians” by “having their hard dull wits softened and sharpened with the sweet delights of poetry.” Yet although it may be commonplace to describe social refinement as a kind of softening or smoothing of blunt or rough manners, in many ways this is a curious notion. What does it mean for early modern schoolmasters to conceptualize the bodily and cultural transformations wrought by an encounter with classical literature in terms of softening? And how can the would-be orator ensure that he is not compromised by the softening force of his education? To put these questions more bluntly, how does one become a proper man after having been subject to the softening force of Ovidian poetry? For although Ovidian verse has the ability to civilize barbarous people, it also threatens to effeminize poets and readers.8 As Sidney explains, opponents of poesy argue that “before poets did soften us, we were full of courage, given to martial exercises, [and] the pillars of manlike liberty.”9 Poesy, according to the sexual innuendo of its critics, softens men’s “pillars.” The association of poetry and effeminacy is a charge often mobilized by Elizabethan moralists: late-sixteenth-century pamphlets by Stephen Gosson and William Stubbes connect poetry, effeminacy, and military weakness.10 This figuration of poetry as an idle pastime that compromises or “softens” masculinity, and thus threatens the polis, dates from Plato’s attack on the poets in the Republic, and is commonplace in Roman culture as well as in Renaissance imitations of that culture.11 This essay will dwell on the charged contradictions that animate this conception of artful language as a means of softening recalcitrant audiences, contradictions that indicate the unexpected range of qualities constellated under the rubric of masculinity in the

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early modern period. For though it connotes detumescence, softening is a key term for the paradoxical strength of verbal eloquence, as the passages quoted above suggest. It is also, not coincidentally, one of Ovid’s favourite figures for bodily transformation and persuasive language.12 Eloquence persuades by softening its audiences, and the humanist pedagogical program requires that would-be orators subject themselves to the tender, relentless mollifications of artful language. This results in a subject position that is a curious combination of supremacy and vulnerability.13 Ovid’s Orpheus, the most ancient and powerful of poets, embodies these contradictions, rendering them central to Renaissance theories of poetry and rhetoric. Orpheus’s song is so forceful that it moves the gods of the Underworld, and causes trees, animals, and stones to shift and reassemble according to its harmonies. In this way, the myth offers a hyperbolic vision of the world-changing power of verbal eloquence. According to Horace’s depiction of poetic eloquence, Orpheus’s ability to “move” beasts, trees, and rocks signifies the power of artful language to transform savagery into civic order, and by the late Middle Ages, the Orpheus myth was often construed as an allegory of the artes liberales.14 Sidney draws on this vision when he claims that poets are the fathers of all learning, “for not only in time they had this priority … But went before them, as causes to draw with their charming sweetness the wild untamed wits to an admiration of knowledge. So, as Amphion was said to move stones with his poetry to build Thebes, and Orpheus to be listened to by beasts, indeed, stony and beastly people.”15 Yet though Orpheus’s music compels “wild” and “untamed” audiences to live in civil concord, Ovid’s version of the myth also depicts Orpheus as unable to control the force of his own song, as he fails to retrieve Eurydice from the Underworld, renounces the love of women for that of boys, and is ultimately torn limb from limb by the Maenads in revenge for his disdain. If we are to understand the story as a mythopoetic expression of the civilizing power of humane learning, then it would seem that such an educative process entails the radical subjection of the poet to a variety of superior forces. To put it another way, Ovid’s version of the Orpheus story indicates that the softening effects of classical learning might not necessarily empower the individual, but simply further the transmission of such learning across time and space. Building on the line of argument I have traced thus far, the remainder of this short chapter

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will examine the complicated virtue of softness and softening in vernacular figurations of the Orpheus myth, in order to suggest how the fraught masculinity of the Orphic figure becomes enfolded into broader conceptions of verbal persuasion and literary transmission in early modern England. *** Orpheus, a Priest, and speaker for the gods, First frighted men, that wildly liv’d in woods, From slaughters and foul life; and for the same Was Tygers said, and Lyons fierce to tame: Amphion too, that built the Theban towers, Was said to move the stones by his Lutes powers, And lead them with his soft songs, where he would: This was the wisdom that they had of old, Things sacred from profane to separate; The public from the private; to abate Wild ranging lusts, prescribe the marriage good, Build townes, and carve the lawes in leaves of wood. And thus at first, an honor, and a name To divine Poets, and their verses came. Ben Jonson’s translation of Horace, The Art of Poetry (1640)16 Orpheus his tongue surmounted all other: it delited, and allured: it moued, and rauished: it pearsed, and pleased . . . Francis Clement, The petie schole (1587)17 Though it is Virgil’s and Ovid’s Orpheus who tends to be most familiar to early modern poets as well as modern readers, Orpheus first appears in the poetry of early Greece as a poet-shaman whose song works a kind of magic on its audience. Ancient literature offers divergent responses to the apparent magic of Orphic eloquence: Euripides and Aeschylus associate the pleasure of Orpheus’s song with the humanizing power of art and civilization while Plato regards Orpheus’s verbal magic with great suspicion. Plato’s Ion and Protagoras cite Orpheus as an incarnation of the most disturbing attributes of oral song – its power to move large audiences by producing irrational emotional responses that preclude the philosophical search for truth.18

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Thus the treatment of the myth in ancient texts establishes the quasisupernatural influence of Orphic song while also indicating a potential conflict between the power of eloquence to move its audiences, the philosophical pursuit of truth, and civic investments in stability. The potential conflict between eloquence and order is not as prominent in Roman versions of the Orpheus myth, including those contained in Virgil’s Georgics and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which construct a new Greco-Roman version of the tale that emphasizes Orpheus’s role as lover of Eurydice. When Eurydice is fatally bitten by a snake on their wedding day, Orpheus descends into the underworld in order to win her back. He uses the power of his song to persuade the gods of Hades to release his bride, only to lose her a second time when he disobeys the command not to gaze back as they depart the Underworld. In his grief Orpheus renounces all women, promising to love only boys, and his mournful song draws trees, beasts, and stones to follow him. In Ovid’s version of the myth, Orpheus then sings five songs to himself on a hillside in Thrace, including the tales of Jupiter and Ganymede, Apollo and Hyacinthus, Pygmalion and Galatea, Cinyras and Myrrha, and Venus and Adonis (Venus also sings the tale of Atalanta to Adonis). Yet despite the power of his song – a power that is variously returned to in many of these nested tales – Orpheus is eventually torn apart by a howling band of Maenads in revenge for his scorn. Dismemberment, however, does not quiet his voice, and Orpheus’s severed head and lyre continue to sing as they float down the Hebrus to the island of Lesbos, where Apollo protects the head from the bite of a snake and gives it the power of prophecy. Orpheus’s shade is then at last reunited with Eurydice in the Underworld. There is much that is disturbing in this story, but early modern schoolmasters and rhetors tend to gloss the myth of Orpheus as a parable of the civilizing power of learning, particularly its ability to persuade men to live in civic order. Indeed, we can think of the tale as an organizing myth for the larger humanist project, and allusions to it in English rhetorical manuals often mobilize Horace’s interpretation of the myth in the Ars Poetica in order to claim Orpheus as an agent of civilization. For example, Thomas Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorike (1567) writes, “Poetes doe declare, that Orpheus the Musician and Minstrell, did stirre and make softe, with his pleasaunte melodie, the most harde rockes and stones. And what is their meanyng herin: Assuredly nothing els, but that a wise and well spoken manne, did call back hard harted menne.”19 As George Puttenham’s Arte of

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English Poesie (1589) puts it, such tales “figur[e] thereby the mollifying of hard and stony hearts by … sweet and eloquent persuasion.”20 In the Epistle to The Garden of Eloquence (1593), Henry Peacham declares that the eloquent man is “fit to rule the world,” citing Orpheus as an example of “men in times past, who by their singular wisdom and eloquence, made sauage nations ciuil, wild people tame, and cruell tyrants not only to become meeke, but likewise mercifull.”21 Allusions to the Orpheus myth have a particular force in these early vernacular rhetorical manuals because they inevitably evoke the transformation of the English people from a savage and barbaric condition to a civilized community, softened and reshaped by a powerful vernacular eloquence. This Horatian view of Orpheus as civilizer also influences early English translations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Like the allusions to Orpheus in sixteenth-century rhetorical manuals, such mythography focuses on Orpheus’s animal, arboreal, and mineral audience. English translators regularly gloss the animals, trees, and rocks in Orpheus’s audience as figures for the barbarous and irrational elements of human society. (Ovid uses the term “ferarum” to refer to the wild animals who listen to Orpheus’s song, a term that might mean “savage” or “wild” animals, but also “uncivilized” or “uncultivated,” as well as simply “fierce.”22) In the Epistle to his 1567 English Metamorphoses, Golding explains that the movement of the “savage beasts,” the holding of the “fleeting birds,” and the moving of the “senseless stones” in response to Orpheus’s song signifies That in his doctrine such a force and sweetness was implied That such as were most wild, stour, fierce, hard, witless, rude and bent Against good order, were by him persuaded to relent And for to be conformable to live in reverent awe Like neighbours in a commonweal by justice under law.23 In such interpretations, the “savage beasts” are understood to be allegorizations of uncivilized people, people who are then made “conformable” to law through the civilizing force of Orpheus’s song. George Sandys’s commentary on Book 11 of his English translation of The Metamorphoses similarly describes “the music of Orpheus” as “that concord … Which had reduced wild people to ciuility.”24 In his commentary, Sandys also quotes Horace’s description of Orpheus

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as a figure who restrains “wandring lust” and deters “rude” men from “savage” life.25 The savagery of the wild beasts has been converted to that of uncivil men, restrained by the forceful tunes of the eloquent orator-poet. In all these instances, “hardness” is a quality of barbarism, one that can be altered by the mollifying force of humane learning. This mythography preserves the paramount stature of the poet: the Orphic singer is one who can change the world without recourse to physical coercion. By positing Orpheus as an indomitable figure for the civilizing power of learning, early modern rhetors are able to assert the robust masculinity of the eloquent orator, whose power is often sexualized as a kind of penetration of his audiences.26 As in the catalogue offered by Francis Clement and quoted above, the force of eloquence “pearses,” “moues,” and even “rauishes” its audiences. Joshua Poole’s The English Parnassus (1657), which collects a list of synonyms for rhetoric from the works of English poets, similarly describes eloquence as: “Heart-stealing, soul-moving, soul-raping, perswasive, smooth, oyly, courtly, varnisht, quaint, painted, glozing, insinuating, victorious, overcoming, delicious, sweet-lipt, soul-invading, bewitching, inchanting, encharming, Nectareous, ambrosian, ear-captivating, fancy-tickling.”27 Such language depicts the orator’s performance as a sexualized possession of the auditor, one that conjures erotic pleasure but may also be indistinguishable from rape.28 Ovid’s poetry likewise sexualizes verbal skill, and Renaissance allusions to Ovid describe his influence in much the same terms as those used to describe persuasive eloquence in general.29 However, Ovid’s tale of Orpheus also works against this gendering of the eloquent man as the agent of sexual penetration in various significant ways. Most notably, Ovid’s Orpheus is a lover of boys, who sings tales of unwilled erotic transformation and whose own body is vulnerable to inscription by outside forces.30 Moreover, as Wayne Rebhorn has emphasized, though the commonplace depiction of rhetoric as penetrative rape may be intended to shore up the masculinity of the rhetor, this gendering is complicated by the fact that the rhetor’s audience – that is, the people that he is imagined to be penetrating with his eloquence – are themselves usually also male. Orpheus’s savage audience is thus like the population of the English grammar schools, subject to the impressions of classical rhetoric.31 And although he is a self-reflexive figure for Ovid’s poetic art, ultimately Orpheus himself also succumbs to the transformations inscribed by the poem, with his body dismembered and his head

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scattered with his lyre into the river Hebrus. In making available two such divergent mythographies for the power of the poet – in which Orpheus is alternately triumphant and abject, active and passive – Ovid’s idiosyncratic account of Orpheus’s life dramatizes the animating contradictions of the classical arts of language, contradictions that consolidate around the gendered identity of the poet as well as the erotic disposition thought to attend such an identity. From its inception in the ancient world, the art of rhetoric has persistently produced various kinds of gender trouble, trouble that becomes ever more acute as rhetoric is transferred to new cultural locales.32 So long as rhetorical practice is plausibly essential to the functioning of the polis – as in ancient Greece – its stature as a masculine pursuit remains relatively secure. However, as the ancient art becomes adapted to new, non-democratic contexts (first imperial Rome, and subsequently absolutist Europe) and new discourses (such as literary production rather than judicial and deliberative oration), its masculinist, civilizing pretensions become ever more doubtful. Even the great Augustan teachers of rhetoric were already aware that rhetoric might no longer constitute any kind of genuine public engagement under the rule of the Principate. And as the social function of rhetoric veers away from the practical business of statecraft and begins to serve other concerns, its gendering becomes more complicated. Thus, as Rebhorn demonstrates in his comprehensive study of the Renaissance discourse of rhetoric, from Cicero and Quintilian onwards we can discern a persistent worry that the study of rhetoric might be effeminizing. Roman and Renaissance rhetors alike worry about the emasculating effects of rhetoric, particularly since rhetorical eloquence might be mistaken for idle talk, which is stereotypically female.33 Cicero and Quintilian respond to this problem by producing an image of rhetoric as an art of combat and competition, while displacing the problem of idleness and loquacity onto the Graeculi, or “Greeklings.” Rebhorn explains that this diminutive identifies the Greeks as boys or boy-men, and so evokes a vision of passive, and thus effeminizing, sodomitical activity from which proper Roman rhetoric can be distinguished.34 Renaissance rhetorics adopt these very concepts when they denounce overmuch concern with style and adornment as effeminizing. The conventional Roman ideal of masculinity requires action rather than talk, and so defenders of rhetoric needed to construct an ideal of virile eloquence that could be distinguished from a lax and

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effeminate speech. For this reason, classical and Renaissance arts of rhetoric often rely on patriarchal, heteronormative teleologies to authorize certain conceptions of proper language as “natural.”35 For instance, there is a longstanding classical and humanist tradition that routinely denounces flaccid or nerveless expression, conflating poetic and rhetorical style with approved forms of masculinity. Within this strain of the classical tradition, sanctioned forms of expression exhibit a style that Seneca, Quintilian, and Erasmus variously term robusta, fortis, virilis, and nervosus (vigorous, energetic, manly, and sinewy), the opposite of a style disdained as enervis, teneris, and mollis (effeminate, tender, and soft).36 As Patricia Parker argues, this opposition between mollis and nervosus conflates style and the male body – mollis or mol is a term for the soft and therefore useless male member while nervus means “penis,” as well as “vigor, force, strength” – and is typically invoked in order to warn against the effeminization of the writer and his compositions.37 This Latin tradition proved to be massively influential. Parker and Lorna Hutson trace the topos of a style that is strong, “sinewy,” and “masculine” across the linguistic boundaries of early modern Europe.38 This discourse demands that in order to protect their virility, writers must energetically distinguish their own linguistic expression from any association with effeminate slackness. Masculinity emerges in a verbal style that avoids excessive ornamentation, and if one must write poetry at all, it should be in a militaristic genre such as epic. Scholars now tend to depict early modern masculinity not as a univocal ideal but rather as a historically specific system of beliefs and practices.39 As the above discussion suggests, the most familiar code of masculinity from this period is a heroic one, evoking qualities of courage, physical strength, and manly honour, summed up in the Roman ideal of virtus.40 Such masculinity had to be rigorously maintained in the face of its own potential dissolution, thus assertions of male identity are frequently shadowed by opposite notions of emasculation and effeminacy.41 However, early modern scholars have recently drawn attention to the circulation of alternate ideas of masculinity, specifically constructions of masculine identity that emerge from experiences of vulnerability.42 Such work has made it possible to consider the discourse of effeminacy as a code of gender as important to the early modern period as codes of masculinity and femininity, and yet perhaps more difficult to pin down. Ian Frederick Moulton observes that effeminacy is an extraordinarily multivalent concept, and might be used by early modern moralists to disparage a wide

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range of disorderly activities and postures, so long as those activities seemed in some way to favour sensual indulgence at the expense of manly reason.43 Gary Spear argues that this conceptual lability renders effeminacy essentially indefinable: from the 1550s onward “the term could name phenomena as widely divergent as male physical weakness, love of excessive pleasure (especially sexual pleasure with women), or an antiheroic military ethos”; effeminacy could also attend the vice of sodomy.44 Effeminacy, Spear emphasizes, is a trait of e­ xcessive male desire regardless of object choice. “Effeminate” could also be used as a verb “meaning to weaken, to corrupt, to cause to degenerate – not just to enfeeble men but to weaken and corrupt entire social institutions identified with male (or, as later feminist criticism would have it, ‘patriarchal’) power.”45 Thus the framework of effeminacy was flexible enough to police a range of historical concerns relating to both men and women, including but not limited to erotic behaviour. Ovid’s poetry revels in this imbrication of stylistic prescriptions with codes of gender and erotic behaviour, though to very different ends from those of Roman moralists. As is well known, Ovid playfully resists the normative teleologies of Roman masculinity and poetic style, producing what early modern readers considered to be a “wanton” style.46 Renaissance readers delighted in the erotic qualities of this poetry, in which language and bodies (forma, figura, corpora) are shaped and reshaped by polymorphous desire.47 Ovid’s poetry often toys with the mollis/nervosus, or effeminate/virile, opposition outlined in theories of classical oratory and poetry, exemplifying the stylistic and thematic concerns censured as effeminate by classical and humanist moralists alike. It reimagines the gendered split between mollis and nervosus, or effeminate softness and masculine vigour, constructing of an idea of masculinity characterized by subjection rather than empowerment. This is particularly evident in Ovid’s version of the Orpheus myth, which is widely construed as a meta-technical reflection on Ovid’s own art.48 Orpheus is the most ancient and powerful of poets, and yet, even at the apex of his own power – when he wins Eurydice back from the grips of death – Ovid’s Orpheus positions himself as subject to a larger force. Indeed, this subjection is the content of his song, foreshadowing the rest of Book X. When he stands before Pluto and Proserpina to plead for Eurydice, Orpheus declares, “vicit Amor [“Love has conquered me”],” or, as Golding translates it, “Love surmounted power” (X.26). Later, after he has glanced back at Eurydice

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and thus lost her a second time, “He longed, he begged, in vain [­orantem frustraque iterum transire volentem] to be allowed / To cross the stream of Styx a second time.”49 Previously Orpheus had converted his subordination to love into an astonishing poetic power, stunning the gods of Hades, but now his words have lost their force. His once omnipotent song no longer unlocks the entrance to the Underworld. Ovid next tells us that in the three years that Orpheus wanders in grief after this second death of Eurydice, he repulses the love of women, “ille etiam Thracum populis fuit auctor amorem / in teneros transferre mares citraque iuventam / aetatis breve ver et primos carpere flores [He set the example for the people of Thrace of giving his love to tender boys, and enjoying the springtime and first flower of their youth]” (X.83-5).50 This transfer of desire to “tender boys” shapes the remainder of the myth, and indeed provokes Orpheus’s eventual death at the hands of the women he has spurned. In the extended interlude that follows Orpheus’s rejection of women, he sings a number of songs that allow Ovid’s poem to dilate on a variety of queer eroticisms (including the desire a sculptor feels for his own statue, that which gods and goddesses feel for young boys, and that which a daughter feels for her father). The tender malleability and erotic appeal of boys in particular becomes a motif that threads through the remainder of Book X, shaping both the content and the style of Orpheus’s song.51 The poem frames the stories of Book X with the following introduction: Tale nemus vates attraxerat inque ferarum concilio, medius turbae, volucrumque sedebat. ut satis inpulsas temptavit pollice chordas et sensit varios, quamvis diversa sonarent, concordare modos, hoc vocem carmine movit: “ab Iove, Musa parens, (cedunt Iovis omnia regno,) carmina nostra move! Iovis est mihi sape potestas dicta prius: cecini plectro graviore Gigantas sparsaque Phlegraeis victricia fulmina campis. nunc opus est leviore lyra, puerosque canamus dilectos superas inconcessisque puelas ignibus attonita meruisse libidine poenam.” Such was the grove the bard had drawn, and he sat, the central figure in an assembly of wild beasts and birds. And when he had tried the chords by touching them with his thumb, and his ears

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told him that the notes were in harmony although they were of different pitch, he raised his voice in this song: “From Jove, O Muse, my mother – for all things yield to the sway of Jove – inspire my song! Oft have I sung the power of Jove before; I have sung the giants in a heavier strain, and the victorious bolts hurled on the Phlegraean plains. But now I need the gentler touch, for I would sing of boys beloved by gods, and maidens inflamed by unnatural love and paying the penalty of their lust.” (X.143-54, my emphasis) In his new seclusion from human society, Orpheus announces his intention to alter the content and the style of his song, which no longer features the wars of Jove and thus requires a different kind of verse. In this moment, as Elizabeth Marie Young argues, Ovid reworks the Orpheus myth into an etiology of Roman love elegy.52 Orpheus is not an epic poet; he is an erotic poet singing a lyric song. After asking his muse to alter his style from heavy to light (graviore to leviore), Orpheus then makes true on his promise by immediately singing the brief song of Ganymede, the Trojan boy who caused Jove to burn with love (amore arsit [X.155-6]), followed by the tale of Apollo and Hyacinthus, another beautiful young man. Ovid began his poetic career as an elegist, and Orpheus’s turn to a different harmony in Book X of The Metamorphoses evokes the opening lines of Ovid’s Amores, which feature a speaker who turns from the more distinguished genres of epic and tragedy to the “lighter” verse of elegy. In Christopher Marlowe’s English translation (c.1599), the first elegy begins, With Muse prepared I meant to sing of arms, Choosing a subject fit for fierce alarms. Both verses were alike till Love (men say) Began to smile and took one foot away.53 [Arma gravi numero violentaque bella parabam Edere, materia conveniente modis. par erat inferior versus – risisse Cupido dicitur atque unum surripuisse pedem.54 Despite the speaker’s avowed aim to sing a Virgilian epic (the poem begins with the same word as Virgil’s Aeneid: arma), Cupid replaces the poet’s “gravi numero” with “numeris levioribus,” or “lighter

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numbers.” Although “elegy” is an Elizabethan term for any epistolary poem of love or complaint, in Greek and Roman verse “elegy” refers to the meter of a poem – alternating dactylic hexameters and pentameters in couplets known as elegiac distichs – rather than to its mood or content.55 Thus the meter of the poem conveys the conflict of a speaker who aims to write epic poetry but is diverted by erotic concerns, which lighten the weightiness of his verse so that he must instead write love-elegy. In addition to shaping the meter of the poems, the shift from epic to elegy in the first poem of the Amores also results in a sequence that features erotic subjection rather than military or political achievement. As I have written elsewhere, Marlowe cannot replicate the effects of Cupid’s thievery in his poetic line, as vernacular poetry has no measure like the Latin elegiac couplet.56 Marlowe instead introduces a new way of accounting for the shift from epic to elegiac poetry in English verse, figuring it as a kind of softening. This adoption of “soft” as a means of designating a particular style of anglicized classical verse has implications for attempts to translate the Orpheus story as well. In All Ouids Elegies, Marlowe’s speaker explains, “When in this work’s first verse I trod aloft, / Love slacked my muse, and made my numbers soft” (1.1.21-2). Using rhyming couplets to pair “aloft” and “soft,” Marlowe depicts the shift from the arms of epic to the idleness of love poetry as a slackening and softening of his verse. Ovid’s text reads instead: “My new page of song rose well with first verse on lofty strain, when that next one – of thy making – changes to slightness the vigour of my work” (cum bene surrexit versu nova pagina primo, / attenuat nervos proximus ille meos) (1.17-18). The lines pun on male detumescence (nervos means both “vigour” and “penis”), implying that the poet is effeminized by what Marlowe translates as the “change” from talk of “arms” to “Love,” which is the work of an “idle bosom” (Elegies 1.1.30). The resulting English poetry is, as Marlowe puts it, “slack.” Elegy is a poetic genre in which the male lover abdicates the normal rights of masculine domination and accepts the label of effeminate softness, or mollitia.57 Whereas moralizing historians, orators, and philosophers denounce softness and its associations, the writers of Latin elegiacs (including Tibullus, Propertius, and Catullus as well as Ovid) flaunt their soft idleness as a defining characteristic of the state of being in love.58 For example, in Marlowe’s translation of Amores 2.1, the speaker disdains to write of “great celestial battles” (2.1.11), and instead, “Toys and light elegies, my darts, I took, /

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Quickly soft words hard doors wide open strook” (2.1.21-2). Later in the sequence, the speaker also rejects “tragic verse,” writing, “We, Macer, sit in Venus’ slothful shade, / And tender love hath great things hateful made” (2.18.2-4). Becoming pliant in desire, the speaker happily “yields” to his lady’s kisses, “and back my wit from battles bring, / Domestic acts, and mine own wars to sing” (2.18.11-12). In all of these passages from Ovid’s Amores, a network of Latin terms associated with processes of softening and effeminization – blandis, mollis, teneris – signify the speaker’s turn from distinguished poetic genres to what Marlowe’s English translation terms the softer, lighter, looser, and more tender material of love elegy. Ovid’s Latin terms evoke a range of different sensibilities, including charm, allure, flattery, pliability, delicacy, and even sweetness as well as suppleness. These terms thus associate the idea of softness with the effeminate lassitude indulged in “Venus’ slothful shade.” Ovid draws upon the very same network of terms in order to designate the content and style of the songs sung by Orpheus on the hillside in Thrace, the songs that so transfix his savage audience. As in the Amores, Ovid describes the different pitch of Orpheus’s new harmony, as “leviore lyra,” a lighter or smoother song. And, like Marlowe, another early English translator translates the “lighter touch” of Orpheus’s song as a form of softening. George Sandys’ translation reads, “Now, in a lower tune, to louely boyes / Belou’d of Gods, turne we our softer layes” (340).59 Orpheus then sings the remainder of Book X, featuring many of the myths most beloved by early modern poets.60 The Orphic frame recedes over the course of Book X but we are abruptly reminded of the presence of our singer and his non-human audience at the beginning of Book XI, which opens with the declaration that “Carmine dum tali silvas animosque ferarum / Threicius vates et saxa sequentia ducit [So with his singing Orpheus drew the trees, / The beasts, the stones, to follow …]”61 But the uproar of the Maenads drowns out Orpheus’s “softer layes,” so that his savage audience can no longer be “softened by the singer’s music [cunctaque tela forent cantu mollitia]” (Humphries XI.16, XI.15). Once the audience cannot hear Orpheus’s song, violence reigns again. The civilizing force of Orphic eloquence depends on its ability to soften its audiences; indeed, the first stone thrown at the poet “was conquered by the sweet harmonious music” (Humphries XI.12). Or, as Sandys writes, An Other hurles a stone; this, as it flew, His voice and harps according tunes subdue

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Which selfe-accus’d for such a rude assay, Before his feet, as in submission lay. (368) But after the harmonies of Orpheus’s song are silenced – harmonies that are variously described by Ovid’s English translators as “soft” and “sweet” – the stones no longer submit to his music and the poet is brutally dismembered. Ovid provides an extensive description of the violent death of Orpheus: Maenads hurl spears and stones at his body, weapons that first murder the encircling birds and beasts who had gathered to listen to the bard. They then hurl clods of earth at him and gather up farm implements to strike his body with mattocks, rakes, and hoes. The poet compares this violent death to that of “a Stag at bay, In th’Amphitheater now made a prey / To eager hounds.”62 Ovid’s description emphasizes the fierce savagery and madness of the women (ferinus, ferarum, furori), likening them to wild animals. At the end of this torment, the poet finally dies: “Euen through that mouth (ô Iupiter!) which drew / From stones attention, which affection bred / In saluage beasts, his forced spirits fled!”63 The mouth that had sung the songs that subdued savage beasts now lets Orpheus’s spirit flee in death. But Orpheus is still not free of the force of his music; even after his death, he must continue to sing: “The poet’s limbs lay scattered all around; but his head and lyre, O Hebrus, thou didst receive, and (a marvel!) while they floated in mid-stream the lyre gave forth some mournful notes, mournfully the lifeless tongue murmured, mournfully the banks replied [membra iacent diversa locis, caput, Hebre, lyramque / excipis: et (mirum!) medio dum labitur amne, / flebile nescio quid queritur lyra, flebile lingua / murmurat examinis, respondent flebile ripae]” (XI.50-3). As this recapitulation aims to demonstrate, softening and savagery thread through the Orpheus story in ways that complicate the Horatian view of the poet as the font of a supreme power wielded in support of civilization. The savage animals are stayed by the “softer layes” of Book X, true, and they remain charmed by Orpheus’s music until they themselves are murdered in the wild tumult of the Maenads. The tales sung by Orpheus thus both dramatize the incredible force of eloquent music and also inscribe its limitations in the most violent possible terms. If we consider Books X and XI of The Metamorphoses in their entirety, we must conclude that if Orpheus figures the masculine force of the eloquent man (what Quintilian terms the vir bonus dicendi

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peritus), it is a masculinity that careens between extremes of potency and vulnerability. Early modern poets, writing in the aftermath of an Ovidian education, are alive to erotic force of these contradictory positions. For example, an allusion to Orpheus in Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona (ca.1590–91) encapsulates this oscillation between heroism and subjection in an anglicization of the polarity of nervosus and mollis. The aptly named Proteus, in describing the “force of heaven-bred poesy,” declares that, Orpheus’ lute was strung with poets’ sinews, Whose golden touch could soften steel and stones, Make tigers tame, and huge leviathans Forsake unsounded deeps to dance on sands.64 Shakespeare’s allusion to Orpheus documents the mutual sensitivity of both poet and audience, who become jointly subject to the softening force of eloquent song. Crucially, this passage does not put the human poet in firm control of these physical transformations. Rather, as Jonathan Bate writes, the passage indicates the precarious position of the poet.65 Shakespeare’s “sinew” appears to be an English trans­ lation of the Latin nervus, which can mean “muscle” or “tendon” as well as the “string of a musical instrument.” In Book X of the Metamorphoses, Ovid repeatedly uses nervi to refer to the strings of Orpheus’s lyre as well as Apollo’s bowstring, and for early modern humanists, it is the preferred term for a masculine Latin expression. However, in this passage, the word “sinew” does not shore up the masculine strength of poetic expression (as the softening of “steel and stones” heavily implies). Instead, the passage depicts poets as both the source of vigorous eloquence (akin to Orpheus himself) and at the same time subject to its transformative power (like the strings of the lyre). And the radical sensitivity apparent in the allusion to the “poet’s sinews” indicates the intertwining of conceptions of poetic force with a kind of sexual abjection.66 Indeed, that abjection seems to be a prerequisite for the astonishing power to “make tigers tame, and huge leviathans / Forsake unsounded deeps.” As I stated out the outset, the humanist language arts draw on the myth of Orpheus so as to describe eloquence as that which forges civilization and shores up the strength of the virile male body. However, despite the utility of this Horatian reading of the Orpheus figure, Ovid proffers a different vision of the masculinity of the poet and his

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carmina. Rather than an agent of civic order, Orpheus becomes instead a figure for the poet’s vulnerability to the transformative power of eloquence. Ovid’s Orpheus thus provides an alternate mythos of literary transmission, one in which the poet himself is drawn into a chain of influence that results in the scattering (sparsos) of his body and authority, as he becomes subject and object of his own song. As Young has written, the various framings that Ovid crafts for the Orpheus story encourage readers to choose between endings, “privileging either triumph or mourning, continuity or rupture … Focusing either on the transcendent powers of a victorious Orpheus or on his downfall – and his mangled corpse.”67 But for many early modern poets, there is no choice to be made, as the Orpheus myth resolves these very dichotomies into a syncretic vision of literary history, albeit a literary history characterized by subjection and loss rather than productivity and inheritance.68 This model of textual production demands the scattering of the poet’s corpus, so that he and his words can join the flow of literary history, able to soften others in turn.

Not e s   1 Philip Sidney, The Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 214.  2 Ovid, Tristia. Ex Ponto, trans. A.L. Wheeler, rev. G.P. Goold (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1988), 2.9.47-8.   3 Wayne Rebhorn locates the most influential articulations of this claim in Isocrates’s Antidosis, Cicero’s De inventione and De oratore, Horace’s Ars poetica, and Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria. See Wayne Rebhorn, The Emperor of Men’s Minds: Literature and the Renaissance Discourse of Rhetoric (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 25. For a detailed analysis of how rhetoric enables the production of these racialized distinctions between the civilized and the barbarous, see Ian Smith, Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarian Errors (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2009).   4 See Rebhorn, The Emperor, 23–9.   5 As Lynn Enterline succinctly explains, “the Latin grammar school was designed to intervene in the social reproduction of eloquent masculinity”; “Rhetoric and Gender in Early Modern British Literature,” Oxford Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, ed. Michael J. MacDonald (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 489–504.

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  6 Enterline emphasizes such misfires of the humanist educational program in her important critique of Walter Ong’s still influential description of Latin language instruction as a “Renaissance puberty rite” that consolidates normative gender categories. Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012, 17; Ong, “Latin Language Study as a Renaissance Puberty Rite,” Studies in Philology 56 (1959): 103–24. And, as Stephen Guy-Bray emphasizes, the classical texts that were taught as examples of proper style would have exposed educated Englishmen to a wide range of culturally approved texts suffused with homoeroticism. Stephen Guy-Bray, Homoerotic Space: The Poetics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 5.   7 See Richard Helgerson, “Language Lessons: Linguistic Colonialism, Linguistic Postcolonialism, and the Early Modern English Nation,” Yale Journal of Criticism 11.1 (1998): 289–99; Margaret Ferguson, Dido’s Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Sean Keilin, Vulgar Eloquence: On the Renaissance Invention of Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).   8 Ovid and his early modern imitators forged a highly rhetorical poetics, and early modern writers such as Sidney often draw upon rhetorical ­discourse in order to articulate the cultural and bodily force of poesy.  9 Sidney, Major Works, 234. 10 Stephen Gosson, The schoole of abuse (London: Thomas Woodcocke 1579); Philip Stubbes, The Anatomie of abuses (London: Richard Jones, 1583). Ian Frederick Moulton, Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 7–85. 11 As Brian Vickers explains in an extensive history of Roman and Renaissance conceptualizations of otium, for moralizing Roman writers, otium signifies activity with no practical outcome, the antithesis of Roman virtus, and is pursued by men who are over-talkative, soft, and lazy. Brian Vickers, “Leisure and Idleness in the Renaissance: The Ambivalence of Otium,” Renaissance Studies 4.1 (1990): 7, 1–37. For a detailed study of how Roman valuations of erotic excess and extremity shaped the work of Renaissance writers, see Joshua Scodel, Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). 12 Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 77. 13 As Enterline trenchantly puts it, “the sheer number of violated bodies associated with rhetorical predicaments in Ovid’s poem suggests that,

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however unsettling it may seem, phantasms of ‘the body in bits and pieces’ became part of the cultural high ground humanists were so assiduously trying to cultivate – and by that route, part of the warp and woof of early modern masculinity” (“Rhetoric and Gender,” 490). 14 Patricia Vicari, “Sparagmos: Orpheus among the Christians,” Orpheus: The Metamorphosis of a Myth, ed. John Warden (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), 66, 63–84. 15 Sidney, Major Works, 213. 16 Ben Jonson, Q. Horatius Flaccus: his Art of poetry (London: I Okes for Iohn Benson, 1640), 23, my emphasis. 17 Francis Clement, The Petie Schole with an English Orthographie (London: Thomas Vautrollier, 1587), 45. 18 Charles Segal, Orpheus: The Myth of the Poet (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Universitiy Press, 1989), 16. 19 Thomas Wilson, The arte of rhetorike (London: Iohn Kingston, 1567), fol. 24v. 20 George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, ed. Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Reborn (Ithaca, N Y: Cornell University Press, 2007), 96. 21 Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (London: H. Iackson, 1593), iiiv. Peacham then quotes a few lines from Horace, adding that “The Poet here vnder the name of tigres and lions, meant not beasts but men, and such men as by their sauage nature & cruell manners, might well be ­compared to fierce tigres and deuouring lions, which notwithstanding by the mightie power of wisdome, and prudent art of perswasion were couerted from that most brutish condition of life, to the loue of humanitie, & polliticke gouernment” (iiiv). 22 Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller, rev. G.P. Goold (Cambridge, M A: Harvard University Press, 1984), XI.1. Further references to this text cited parenthetically. 23 Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Arthur Golding, ed. Madeline Forey (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001) Epistle. 522-6. Further references to this text cited parenthetically. 24 George Sandys, Ovid’s Metamorphosis. English, Mythologiz’d, and Represented in figures (Oxford: John Lichfield [and William Stansby], 1632), 387. Further references to this text cited parenthetically. 25 Ibid., 355. 26 Rebhorn, The Emperor, 152. 27 Joshua Poole, The English Parnassus, 1657 (Menston, England: The Scholar Press, 1972), 171.

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28 Rebhorn concludes that Renaissance writers produce a disturbing vision of rhetoric as rape in order to defend its masculinity (158, 160). 29 As John Ansley describes Ovid’s influence in a dedicatory poem to his manuscript translation of Ovid’s Ars amatoria (1603): Ovid’s “vaine” of poetry is “like a river rushing downe a hill, / When showres of raine y(e) frutefull bancks do fill, / W(th) natures choicest graces doth abounde, / And sweetely flowes w(th) eloquence profounde.” 30 Thus, as Mario DiGangi has noted, the Orpheus myth is subject to ­radically divergent interpretations by Renaissance writers, who either understand Orpheus as a great poet, orator, and musician, or stress the erotic aspect of his story. In the 1590s in particular, the flourishing of erotic mythological narratives brings Orpheus’s homoeroticism to the forefront of poetic treatments of the myth. Mario DiGangi, The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 45–6. 31 Rebhorn, The Emperor, 170–1. As Guy-Bray has proposed, poetic influence might also be described as a kind of penetration: “the idea of ‘influence’ – in Latin, literally ‘flowing in(to)’ – could have literal and sexual connotations as well as metaphorical and mental ones.” See Loving in Verse: Poetic Influence as Erotic (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), xi. Ovid’s poetry was frequently described as a means of impressing classical learning into the bodies and minds of English students. As Sandys puts it in the preface, “To the Reader,” to his translation of The Metamorphoses, “Fables and Parables … [leaue] behind a deeper impression, then can be made by the liuelesse precepts of Philosophie.” Ouids Metamorphosis Englished, mythologiz’d, and represend in Figures, trans. G.S. (Oxford [and London]: Iohn Lichfield [and William Stansby], 1632). For a study of the queer eroticism of the humanist schoolroom, see Alan Stewart, Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 32 Early modern poets tend to follow Ovid in drawing on rhetorical ­discourse to articulate the power of the poet to “move [mouere]” audiences. 33 The traditional identification of rhetorical ornament with cosmetics, a ­disparaging comparison first articulated in Plato’s Gorgias, further associates the rhetorical art with feminine concerns. Rebhorn, The Emperor, 143; Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen, 1987), 8–35. 34 Rebhorn, The Emperor, 143–4.

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35 As Patricia Parker’s work has demonstrated, the rhetorical handbooks ally the proper placement of words with questions of social regulation, such that the hierarchical order of male and female inhabits discussions of tropes, and questions of gender difference become integral to the regulation of language. Parker, “Motivated Rhetorics: Gender, Order, Rule,” Literary Fat Ladies, 97–125. Thus, as Jeffrey Masten has written of the discourses of philology, rhetoric’s terms and methods are thoroughly implicated in the languages of sex, gender, and the body. Masten, Queer Philologies: Sex, Language, and Affect in Shakespeare’s Time (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 18. 36 Seneca, The Epistles, trans. Richard M. Gummere (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1925) 114.8, 114.16, 114.21, 114.22, 114.25. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, ed. and trans. Donald A. Russell (Cambridge, M A: Harvard University Press, 2001) 5.12.17–18). Patricia Parker, “Virile Style,” Premodern Sexualities, ed. Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), 201, 199–222. 37 Patricia Parker, “Gender Ideology, Gender Change: The Case of Marie Germain,” Critical Inquiry 19.2 (Winter 1993): 353n35, 337–64. See also J.N. Adams, The Latin Sexual Vocabulary (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 38. 38 Parker, “Virile Style,” 202. Lorna Hutson, “Civility and Virility in Ben Jonson,” Representations 78 (Spring, 2002): 1–27. For a broader historical discussion of the gendering of the Latin language as male, see Joseph Farrell, “The Gender of Latin,” in Latin Language and Latin Culture: From Ancient to Modern Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 52–83. 39 For key texts that revised the field’s understanding of early modern masculinity, see Robin Headlam Wells, Shakespeare on Masculinity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Bruce R. Smith, Shakespeare and Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); and Diane Purkiss, Literature, Gender and Politics during the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 40 Wells, 2. See also Myles McDonnell, Roman Manliness: Virtus and the Roman Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) and Maude Gleason, Making Men: Sophists and Self-Preservation in Ancient Rome (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). 41 Gary Spear, “Shakespeare’s ‘Manly’ Parts: Masculinity and Effeminacy in Troilus and Cressida,” Shakespeare Quarterly 44 (Winter 1993): 409, 412, 409–22.

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42 See Catherine Bates, Masculinity, Gender, and Identity in the English Renaissance Lyric (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) and Joseph Campana, The Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Masculinity (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012). 43 Moulton, Before Pornography, 73. 44 Spear, “Shakespeare’s ‘Manly’ Parts,” 411. See also the title essay in David M. Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002). 45 Ibid. 46 Heather James quotes a manuscript poem dating from 1562 that derides Ovid’s “wanton sound, and filthie sense.” James, “Ovid in Renaissance English Literature,” A Companion to Ovid, ed. Peter E. Knox (Malden, MA : Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 426. 47 Colin Burrow, “Re-embodying Ovid: Renaissance Afterlives,” Cambridge Companion to Ovid, ed. Philip Hardie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 301–19; Heather James, “Ovid in Renaissance English Literature,” A Companion to Ovid, ed. Peter E. Knox (Hoboken, NJ : Wiley Blackwell, 2009), 423–41. Since the turn of the century there has been a surge of interest in Ovid’s bodies and early modern literature, with notable early studies including Lynn Enterline, The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) and Goran V. Stanivukovic, ed., Ovid and the Renaissance Body (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001). 48 As Elizabeth Marie Young succinctly explains, “[Orpheus’s] song within a song is an opportunity for Ovid to stop and reflect on his poems own procedures – and on the procedures of Augustan discourse in which his poem participates.” Young, “Inscribing Orpheus: Ovid and the Invention of a Greco-Roman Corpus,” Representations 101.1 (Winter 2008): 6, 1–31. 49 Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. A.D. Melville (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1986), X.74-5. Further references to this text cited parenthetically. 50 English translators often affix a moralizing judgment to this passage. Golding translates the passage as, “He also taught the Thracian folk a stews of males to make / And of the flowering prime of boys the pleasure for to take” (10.91-2). Sandys does not fully translate the passage, providing a marginal note that reads: “Not rendering the Latin fully; of purpose omitted.” His translation reads, “many we’re the lesse / The’affected Poet seeke; but none inioyes. / Who beauty first admir’d in hopefull boyes” (339).

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51 This conflation of poetic and sexual registers is typical of Roman poetry. Ovid’s Amores refer to the verse form of love elegy as “teneris … modis,” or “tender measures” (Amores 2.1.4). As O.B. Hardison explains, classical meter creates a complementary relationship between phonetic-rhythmic materials and the sensations associated with them; thus meter is as important as subject matter in constituting generic form in classical poetics. Prosody and Purpose in the English Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 29. 52 “Ovid uses the Orpheus myth to tell … a tale of generic development that reworks this Greek legend into an etiology of Roman elegy. Transposing an account of literary history onto the arc of the poet’s life, the narrative constructs a revisionist history for this Augustan genre, posing it as the ­triumphal telos of Archaic Greek song” (Young, “Inscribing Orpheus,” 6). 53 Christopher Marlowe, The Complete Poems and Translations, ed. Stephen Orgel (New York: Penguin, 2007) 1.1.1-4. Further references to this text cited parenthetically. 54 Ovid, Heroides and Amores, trans. Grant Showerman, rev. G.P. Goold (Cambridge, M A: Harvard University Press, 1977), 1.1.1-4. 55 Chris Baldick, The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), “elegy.” 56 Jenny C. Mann, “Marlowe’s ‘Slack Muse’: All Ouids Elegies and an English Poetics of Softness,” Modern Philology 113.1 (August 2015): 49–65. 57 Paul Miller, ed., Latin Erotic Elegy: An Anthology and Reader (New York: Routledge, 2002), 4. As Young writes of Catullus and his successors, Latin love poetry cultivates a literary persona that combines erotic vulnerability with rhetorical potency. Elizabeth Marie Young, Translation as Muse: Poetic Translation in Catullus’s Rome (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), 123. 58 Vickers, “Leisure and Idleness,” 19. 59 Orpheus’s turn to the style and material of erotic elegy likely explains why Mario DiGangi identifies Orpheus as “the mythological character who most directly links male homoeroticism with the obstruction of marital (hetero)sexuality.” The Homoerotics, 44. 60 The Pygmalion story reverberates with its larger Orphic frame in depicting a masterful artist who brings his creation to life through a process of ­softening: “temptatum mollescit ebur positoque rigore / subsidit digitis ceditque, ut Hymettia sole / cera remollescit tractataque pollice multas / flectitur in facies ipsoque fit utilis usu” (X.283-6). On softening in the Pygmalion myth, see Jenny C. Mann, “Pygmalion’s Wax: Fruitful

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Knowledge in Bacon and Montaigne,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 45.2 (May 2015): 367–93. 61 Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), XI.1-2. Further references to this text cited parenthetically. 62 Sandys, Ouids Metamorphosis, 370. 63 Ibid. 64 The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1997), III.ii.72, 77-80. 65 Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 110. 66 Orpheus thus offers an alternative to what Carla Freccero has called “the masculine triumphant or melancholic subject of modernity. This is, one the one hand, a subject who revels in and defines himself through conquest, domination, and the annihilation or effacement of the other, or, on the other hand, one who incorporates loss, including lost others, for productive self-aggrandizing ends.” Orpheus, to borrow Freccero’s description of Jean de Lery, “is an embodied subjectivity that opens up the possibility for a relation of reciprocity with the other, where both can be, simultaneously, subject and object, with all the dangers (such as mortality) but also all he pleasures that such a condition entails.” Carla Freccero, “Loving the Other: Masculine Subjectivities in Early Modern Europe,” in The Poetics of Masculinity in Early Modern Italy and Spain, ed. Gerry Milligan and Jane Tylus (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2010), 102, 115, 101–17. 67 Young, “Inscribing Orpheus,” 21. 68 Early modern poetic allusions to Orpheus thus attest to Guy-Bray’s insight that for Renaissance writers, abjection, such as that embodied by the ­dismemberment of Orpheus, may give rise to poetry. Stephen Guy-Bray, Against Reproduction: Where Renaissance Texts Come From (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 34.

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2 Abject Authorship: A Portrait of the Artist in Ovid and His Renaissance Imitators Catherine Bates

Ovid begins the Metamorphoses with the story of creation. As the deity distinguishes the various elements from one another and separates fire from air, air from land, and land from sea – taking “a huge, rude heap … Of things at strife among themselves for want of order due” and duly setting them “in order straight” – so the cosmos comes miraculously into being.1 If the first creative act traces a move from chaos to category, however, the remainder of the poem – Ovid’s own creation – moves in quite the opposite direction. Indeed, one might describe the Metamorphoses as a veritable assault on category, as story after story of incest, sex-change, or the interchangeability of animal, vegetable, and mineral systematically breaks down the various distinctions of generation, gender, and genus. As each of these forms of categorization derives from the same etymological source, moreover (the Aryan root *gen-, “to beget, produce, be born”), so the very generation of Ovid’s poem itself – the apparently endless production and almost unstoppable flow of his burgeoning carmen perpetuum – seems somehow mysteriously bound up with its relentless focus on, and no less relentless disruption of, categorical distinctions.2 It might even be the source of its genius, since this word derives from the same root.3 Where the deity responsible for creation is masculinised as mundi fabricator [the maker of the world] and opifex rerum [the maker of all things], Ovid tempers any notion of an exclusively masculine creative energy by suggesting that “Hanc deus et melior litem natura diremit” [God – or kindlier Nature – composed this strife], the male and female principles of generation existing from the outset in a typically ambiguous both/and and/or either/or relation.4 Likewise

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(and no doubt as a result of such generative hybridity), where divine creation is characterized by hierarchy and harmony, order and degree, its human equivalent seems perversely dedicated to the opposite. In one of many depictions of art and artist to appear within the poem, Minerva weaves a tapestry that depicts – in fixed, compartmentalized, and didactic panels – the absolute cosmic power structure and the perils of contesting it (human upstarts are turned permanently into rocks or birds), while her human counterpart Arachne creates a work of art that has no such formal or moral organization (gods shift from shape to shape in quest of their desires) yet seems in contrast to pulse with life.5 In his own poem, similarly, Ovid turns “fixity to process by keeping the web-spinning alive as the ultimate mortal expression of art.”6 One result, naturally enough, is to upset any notion of genre, for, in the human artist’s bold disregard not only for the categories of sex and species but of social distinction as well, he mixes “high” and “low” literary forms as indiscriminately as he mixes different classes of being. His work is thus impossible to categorise. The Metamorphoses might be epic in scale, but the myriad comedies, tragedies, elegies, pastorals, lyrics, and laments that comprise it render it plotless and unlike any other epic in the canon. The poem takes its definition, if anywhere, from what it is not: against the “generic purity” of the Aeneid, it constitutes “generic counterstatement.”7 As a consequence, the poem also proves resistant to generalization, for the very thing that makes it “of universal application” – its absence of any single logic, perspective, or focus – is also what militates against its submission to any overarching schema or moralization.8 In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva relates the collapse of category to abjection: a borderline state that marks a place where the supposedly pristine boundaries between subject and object have yet to form and where, in the absence of any “clean” break between the two, distinction remains muddied, jagged, blurred, obscure. “It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.”9 It is from this archaic state that sense-making, meaning-bearing structures will come to emerge – the binaries, categories, and distinctions (subject/object, I/thou, male/ female) that constitute language and culture – but to which these might also, at any time, fearfully revert. Pre-symbolic and pre-objectal, the abject is thus akin to the primal state of chaos, the ground from which divine creation emerges in all its glory but which will always

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hover sickeningly at its edges: the very edges that, in its free passage between civilized and uncivilized, human and non-human, masculine and feminine, life and death, Ovid’s poem seems determined to transgress. Drawing on the work of anthropologist Mary Douglas, Kristeva shows how dietary taboos – biblical injunctions against eating fish that do not swim or things that fly but are not birds, for example, or prohibitions against seething the kid in its mother’s milk – are concerned not with nutrition or hygiene but with taxonomy: the urgent need to separate and exclude anything deemed hybrid, mixed, or categorically indistinct, and that thereby assumes the horror of the sullied, the contaminated, the defiled: “The pure will be that which conforms to an established taxonomy; the impure, that which unsettles it, establishes intermixture and disorder.”10 Such taboos and rituals are required to police and guard the boundaries between genus and generation, however, precisely because these prove so friable, insubstantial, and liable to collapse. With its multiple stories of abomination, species pollution, and boundary violation, this seems to have been the area that Ovid chose, in the Metamorphoses, to make his own special domain: an endlessly replenishing site for the genesis of his art. At the end of the Arachne story, the human artist hangs herself out of spite and shame yet is allowed to live. She thus exists forever after in a halfway state – an abject state – suspended between death and life, spinning the very string from which she hangs, deprived of her own humanity and reduced by her divine rival to animal status, a cautionary tale as fixed and immutable as the others woven into the goddess’s judicial tapestry and yet immortally, ceaselessly spinning her shimmering web, much as Ovid is producing his perpetual song. This essay looks, therefore, at the abject status of the human poet or artist as the key figure that Renaissance poets took away from their interactions with Ovid’s poem. In comparison with Ovid’s pagan world, these poets inherited from Judaeo-Christian tradition the figure of an exclusively male creator-God: one who “sans beginning, seed, and Mother tender, / This great Worlds Father he did first ingender, / (To wit) his Sonne, Wisedome, and Word eternall, / Equall in Essence to th’All-One paternall,” as one such poet emphatically described him.11 Renaissance poets were also, for the most part, introduced to Ovid as exemplary auctor – a model of male poetic genius on whom they were to model their own compositions – within the all-male environment of the grammar-school. As Lynn Enterline has shown, however, Ovid’s own gender-ambiguous models of creativity (whether

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of the world or of the work of art) were to have a corrosive effect on such masculinist ideas of productivity.12 As we have seen, such creator or artist figures may be represented in the Metamorphoses as mas­ culine or feminine, female or male, but we should be wary of taking such apparently stable gender identities at face value. I begin with Kristeva, therefore, to emphasise that abjection precedes those later structurations which constitute human culture and of which the gender binary is perhaps the first. A chaotic and as yet undifferentiated state, abjection can, of course, only be known recursively, from the position of culture that casts its sense-making distinctions backward, imposing sexual difference onto a scene that is logically and chronologically anterior to it. As Kristeva points out, ultimately “The function of these religious rituals is to ward off the subject’s fear of his very own identity sinking irretrievably into the mother,”13 and behind their “tremendous project of separation”14 lies nothing other than the incest taboo. The force of such cultural injunctions is not to be underestimated, nor their capacity for violent domination and discrimination: “Fear of the archaic mother turns out to be essentially fear of her generative power. It is this power, a dreaded one, that patrilineal filiation has the burden of subduing.”15 Crucial to cultural organization as they may be, however, and naturalized as they are, such distinctions of gender and generation are not primary. Rather, abjection is. A pre-civilized, unorganized, polymorphous, and anti-foundationalist state, abjection reveals such distinctions to be “the effect, rather than the cause of signification,” as Enterline puts it elsewhere.16 To start out with ideas of “masculinity” or “femininity,” therefore, is to posit and presume categories the very formation of which Ovid seems bent on undoing. It is to deny that such categories are cultural afterthoughts, and thus to occlude how “unnatural,” vaporous, mobile, fluid, and strange they really are: precisely what Ovid seems determined to explore. It is to this uncanny space, after all, that his characters, if not the poet himself, have constant recourse, since it allows them to get “behind” sexual difference, as it were, and to experience how fragile, how secondary, how far from immutable such critical distinctions turn out to be. Sexual identity seems almost arbitrarily to come and go, to stay or change within the poem, with predictable results for any sense of totality, mastery, or agency that might be claimed on behalf of the human subject, least of all the artist or poet. The “generative power” of such figures in Ovid derives not from any battle between “the sexes”

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– as if those categories were already given or presupposed – but rather from the artificiality and contingency of the gender binary itself. To cite Enterline again: “the dizzying erotic permutations of the Metamorphoses make the poem seem less a fixed representation of gender, difference, and desire than a series of originary histories that are offered, albeit provisionally, as ways of explaining the overwhelming, traumatic nature of amor;”17 and, one might add, of producing poetry. It was not only within the numerous stories of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, moreover, that Renaissance poets found this image of the author as a strangely, almost necessarily, abject figure, but also in their encounter with his text itself. As Leonard Barkan notes, in its newly conceived and self-conscious engagement with pagan antiquity, the Renaissance staged a historical confrontation between self and other that amounted to “a kind of humanist anthropology.”18 Such an encounter – with a culture not only foreign and remote but deemed powerful and crushingly superior – may well have felt to its recipients like the encounters so many of Ovid’s artist-figures experience with gods, or other insuperable forces of heaven or nature, and fail fully to survive or fail to survive unchanged. As another critic puts it, “the place of such a proudly Roman poet within any other civilization must involve a transformation nearly as drastic as those undergone by the characters of the Metamorphoses.”19 Renaissance poets inevitably found themselves and their work altered by such encounters, whether they liked it or not, for better or for worse, even (or perhaps especially) when they translated, plagiarized, quoted directly, or incorporated passages wholesale into their own poetic corpus. This scene, which Gordon Braden describes as “specific foreign bodies continually and consciously received into the intimate occasion of writing,” nicely captures the sense of poetry as penetration that Ovid was habitually to sexualise.20 In the Metamorphoses, poetic inspiration – the prompt that occasions the poet’s breaking into song (and usually breaking down or breaking apart as a result) – is often literalized as an irresistible rush of air: a wind or breath that carries the speaker away and/or speaks through his or her mouth with a different voice. This breath, which could be that of a predecessor poet as much as of a Muse or god, is characterized above all as an alien element: as something that comes from somewhere or someone else. Thus, the air might be in the poetfigure, as when the Cumaean Sybil, “as soon as that the sprite of prophecy / Was entered her,” becomes in her rapture a mouthpiece for the mysterious oracles of Apollo.21 Or the poet-figure might be

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in the air, as when Ganymede is borne aloft, ravished by the amorous Jove in eagle form (often treated as an emblem of poetic inspiration or mystical transport), or as when Daedalus and Icarus don “uncouth wings” and take themselves to an element not their own, with mixed results.22 The latter myth also seems to evoke the classic opposition between ars and ingenium: between art as workmanship and technique, on the one hand (the domain of the rational craftsman and consummately skilled artificer, Daedalus), and art as heroic frenzy, on the other: a shattering infusion of divine power that supersedes all human capacity and all human making, no matter how competent (the would-be domain of the aspirant if tragic Icarus). For all his recklessness and fatal fall, Icarus’s flight has a touch of sublimity about it that his father’s careful attention to health and safety utterly lacks. As critics note, this model of poetic inspiration as uplifting, overwhelming, and knocking the breath from the body is, in terms of gender and sexual orientation, a distinctly ambivalent experience. For the poet-figure is filled with an extraordinary strength and power (hence “masculine”) while at the same time being invaded, possessed, and overmastered by an irresistible force (hence “feminine”).23 And this regardless of whether that figure is presented as “male” or “female” or whether that force belongs to a “male” deity or a “female” Muse, making the experience as likely to be “homo-“ as “heterosexual” and, either way, very far from heteronormative. Similarly, the mellifluous and golden poetry of both Apollo and Orpheus is contrasted with – and constantly loses out to – the wild and pumping strains of Bacchus and Pan, the civilized and civilizing lyre proving no match for the primitive and uncanny sounds that emerge when breath or wind passes over pipes or reeds or through mouths that howl like animals rather than articulating human words.24 When, at the beginning of the Metamorphoses, Ovid invokes the very gods who are responsible for the transformations he is about to describe and asks them to “breathe on these my undertakings,” he is, therefore, sending a distinctly mixed message: an invitation, quite possibly, to be buffeted, blasted, and blown away by their indomitable power.25 As Enterline comments, “Ovid’s pervasive idea of animation [from Greek ἄνεμος, air, breeze, wind] … traces a kind of pneumatic movement through the poem that both fills up speaking subjects and empties them out. For the wind that can give you a voice … can also take it away.”26 And it is precisely this unsettling experience – that one is not master of one’s own voice, that one’s speech comes from

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elsewhere, that one’s own words turn out to be someone else’s and thus escape any naïve sense one might have had of agency, meaning, or intent – that Renaissance poets draw from their own transforming encounter with Ovid’s inspiring poem. Above all Petrarch, who names his beloved not only after the laurel, lauro, into which Apollo’s beloved is transformed (Greek δάφνη, laurel), or the gold, l’auro, which characterises the sun-god’s aureate verse, but also the breeze, l’aura: this being, as Enterline notes, his “rich word for Ovid’s pneumatic, animating definition of poetic voice.”27 In canzone 23 of the Rime sparse (often referred to as the canzone delle metamorfosi), Petrarch presents his act of poesis – the making of his own perpetual song to and for Laura – as a series of Ovidian transformations in which any sense that a speech act might entail some kind of straightforward communication between parties is briskly dispensed with. All he wants to do is tell Laura he loves her but instead he finds himself, as if in a dream, unable to do so at every turn. The apparently simple act of speech is in each case problematized beyond repair, as the poet is prevented from or punished for disclosing something forbidden (like Battus, Byblis, and Actaeon), or punished for not disclosing something required (like Echo), or silenced and only able to sing in death (like Cygnus), or silenced and only able to be spoken of by another (as Daphne is by Apollo).28 When the poet speaks, therefore, what he hears is not so much a human voice as the sound of a gushing fountain, an echo, a swansong, or a deer’s groan; he is not so much the author of golden poetry as a touchstone used to test the purity of gold; not so much the maker of Apollonian lyric as the mute subject matter from which it derives. Abject, de-humanized, and neither female nor male, he characteristically subsists halfway between being alive and dead, “mezzo … tra vivo et morto.”29 From this strange place he speaks differently from himself – from what he thought he sounded like or what he thought he wanted to say – and this experience of selfalienation, of speaking otherwise, derives at least in part from the fact that, inspired by the Metamorphoses, what comes out when Petrarch opens his mouth is Ovid’s voice. When English Renaissance poets come, in turn, to encounter Ovid’s peculiar representations of authorship, these may well have come to them mediated via Petrarch, whose interventions thereby add another voice to the cacophony, another source of inspiration, another alienating layer to the mix. And Ovid’s voice itself, of course, is but “a palimpsest of other voices, a complex fabric of quotations,” as

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Enterline describes it; an “allusive reinterpretation and redistribution of the prior traditions of the classical world – Greek, Roman, Egyptian, epic, elegiac, dramatic, aetiological,” in another critic’s words.30 The idea that a poet, ancient or modern, might speak with anything approaching his “own” voice thus seems increasingly fantastical; any claim he might have to a unique and identifiable “signature” tune, vanishingly remote. On the contrary, any inspiration worthy the name seems to involve being taken over and ventriloquized, usually forcibly, by another’s breath, for without that the poet – like Ovid himself – is simply not moved to speak (breath-taking poetry demands nothing less). As many have argued, Ovid’s impact on Renaissance writers is thus inseparable from the period’s ingrained practice of imitatio.31 Drilled from their early grammar-school years in the humanist practices of double translation and ethopoeia (composing and often reciting the speech of a given character), boys were taught to assimilate classical culture by learning to write as the poets of antiquity wrote and to speak as their characters spoke. This process of finding their “own” voice by means of voicing others meant negotiating various degrees of sameness and difference that could range from the slavish copy (as of a parrot or ape), at one end, through the respectful imitation (as of an echo), to the seamless fusion of old and new (as of a child’s relation to an ancestor or parent), at the other.32 This last was judged the highest achievement, the combination of inheritance and individuality that characterized aemulatio at its best, but even this apparently ideal familial relation lent itself to the abject, the unheimlich, the perverse. For the generation of new, healthy, and self-renewing forms, in nature as in art, involves the judicious mixing of genes. Excessive sameness – as might be figured, for example, by incest, endogamy, homosexuality, narcissism, or cannibalism – leads to sterility or monstrous births. But excessive difference – as might be figured, for example, by relations between humans and statues, animals, half-breeds, or gods (whether in their own or animal, vegetable, or mineral forms) – leads to much the same. Perversity thus lies on either side of a permitted median which is strikingly narrow in its scope and which Ovid, for one, is not remotely interested in preserving. In its plethora of stories about categorical confusion and collapse, Renaissance poets would thus have found in the Metamorphoses images of their own imitatio of its illustrious author, not to mention of classical antiquity as a whole: a relation that is figured in terms not of propriety and decorum but of abjection.

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To that extent, the poets knew better than their humanist educators, and here the figure of Orpheus is a case in point. The schoolmasters, busy promoting the civic function of rhetoric, billed the legendary first poet as a civilizing figure whose song brought category to chaos, order to nature, and society to men. In modelling poetry’s service to the state, Orpheus became the official culture hero of Renaissance poetics, drawing with his “charming sweetness the wild untamed wits to an admiration of knowledge,” as Sidney writes in the Defence.33 But poetics is not the same as poetry, nor theory practice, and in their creative work Renaissance poets knew Orpheus as a figure altogether more contradictory and complex.34 For them he was not only a civilizer but a denizen of barbarian Thrace. Not only the poet of wedded love (the career-model followed by Spenser), but the “half-mad, selfexiled singer who reviles marriage, [and] dotes on boys” (the careermodel followed by Marlowe).35 Not only a son of Apollo but of Bacchus; and not only a victim of the latter’s ecstatic hordes but, like them, a follower of the wine-god, indeed the very “chaplain of his orgies.”36 Not only a poet who has power over trees and animals, over the hounds and inhabitants of Hell, but a poet who (according to the reverse logic typical of dreams) finds himself overpowered by the quality of the “inhuman” that these various beings represent. Overpowered, for example, by sounds that are not human speech, articulations that are not words: by those mechanical, material, sonic, acoustic, rhythmic, and musical aspects of poetic language that do something other than signify or persuade.37 Such elements disrupt the purely instrumental function of language, as the semiotic disturbs the symbolic or as puns disturb meaning, and they might indeed be figured as rending the poet into pieces if communication is all he is thought to be about. The Orpheus beloved of the humanists is thus destroyed by the inimical bacchantes, his regime of order and reason no match for the latter’s inhuman clamour, his civilizing song drowned out by their alien cries. The Orpheus beloved of the poets, by contrast, knows that without such elements poetry would not be poetry, and that if the world is to be more than utterly prosaic, meaning may be a necessary sacrifice. The destruction with which his story ends is thus present from the very beginning, “For Orpheus’ lute was strung with poets’ sinews,” and “sinews used as lute strings can come only from a body that has been unpicked.”38 The women who tear this Orpheus limb from limb are not his enemies but his friends, and -“a wondrous thing” – his decapitated head and shattered harp continue to make

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mournful sounds as they float downstream toward Lesbos, lyric’s home.39 Apparently the poet’s volition is not required for beautiful sounds to emerge from this abject subject who has become an object: neither man nor god, neither mortal nor immortal, neither dead nor alive, yet still playing, still singing. Apollo, meanwhile, provides poets with no less contradictory an identification, for the golden god of youth, archery, hunting, medicine, music, prophecy, poetry, and fame also cuts a strikingly abject figure. Like his protégé Orpheus, Apollo, too, is known for his homo- as well as heterosexual passions (as in his amours for Cyparissus and Hyacinthus, both narrated by Orpheus); for his associations with unruly female utterance (as in the priestesses, sibyls, and oracles through whom he speaks); and for his ongoing vulnerability to the power of “uncivilized” sound (as in the pipe music of Pan, Mercury, and Marsyas).40 Like Orpheus, Apollo, too, is wounded. In his first appearance in what is the first love story of the Metamorphoses, he mutates from being the heroic Python-slayer to the eternally unsuccessful lover of Daphne: an act of revenge on the part of Cupid, whose apparently lesser weapon Apollo has ill-advisedly belittled in comparison with his own. Apollo thus spends the rest of the poem with Cupid’s rankling arrow embedded in his heart, the classic figure of the hunter hunted as his own mighty bow is transformed into the very lyre with which he sings the pain of love and loss. As with Orpheus, his wound does not prevent him from singing but seems, on the contrary, to perpetuate it. These various themes – of poetry, prophecy, ecstatic female utterance, catastrophic wounding or dismemberment, healing, and survival in a strange, abject, half-alive, half-dead state – are, moreover, further repeated and amplified in the interlocking stories of Chiron and Aesculapius, also Apollo’s sons.41 Put together, these connected myths seem to suggest that it is not enough for the vates to be the string-plucking singer of order and reason. He must also incorporate the maddened and wind-sounding howls of the other-than-human, even if these threaten his body, his gender identity, his very existence. This, evidently, is the price to be paid, a necessary condition, if poetry is truly to be poetry and to combine rhyme with reason, rhythm with rhetoric, and energeia (dynamism, the power to move) with enargeia (perceptual clarity). As noted, it is with this wounded, penetrated, and less-than-whole Apollo that Petrarch identifies in the Rime sparse, the laurel an emblem of private failure rather than public victory and yet, for all that, the perpetual generator of

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lyric verse. In the story of Apollo’s love-wound in the Metamorphoses, in fact, Ovid refers back to the Amores where he had signalled his own decisive shift from epic to lyric as being shot in the (metrical) foot by Cupid, losing the manly stride of epic hexameter in the process and being forced to assume the limping measure (with its alternating hexameter and pentameter lines) of Roman love elegy: Then scarce can Phoebus say, “This harp is mine.” When in this work’s first verse I trod aloft, Love slacked my muse, and made my numbers soft, as Marlowe puts it in his translation.42 Like Ovid, Petrarch thus takes the wounded and emasculated Apollo as the patron saint of lyric, and so does every poet who positions himself in relation to the Petrarchan tradition thereafter: whether he denies it like Sidney (“Nor so ambitious am I, as to frame / A nest for my yong praise in Lawrell tree”), or follows it like Spenser (“Then fly no more, fayre love, from Phebus’ chace, / but in your brest his leafe and love embrace”), or Drayton (“I in the Circuit for the Lawrell strove”), or Daniel (simply by naming his beloved “Delia”).43 By the same token, Spenser opens The Faerie Queene with his hero, Prince Arthur, similarly struck down by Cupid’s arrow before the poem has even begun: And thou most dreaded impe of highest Ioue, Faire Venus sonne, that with thy cruell dart At that good knight so cunningly didst roue, That glorious fire it kindled in his hart.44 Indeed, the author seems no less incapacitated than Arthur himself in these preliminary stanzas (where he modestly describes himself as “lowly,” “meane,” “weake,” “dull,” “feeble,” “humble,” “vile,” and “afflicted”), as if both must share a somehow necessary wound in order for the poem and the action to get underway.45 The image of the poet and hero as, like Apollo, nursing a penetrative wound within – the irrational and “feminizing” furor of poetry and of love alike – seems thus to be the formula not only for lyric but for romance.46 Such images of the author and his protagonists as damaged or diminished in some way – as existing in a less than optimal state – often invoke a discourse of anxiety. “Metamorphosis is in itself anxiety-­ provoking,” writes one critic, who finds that the most severe manglings

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in Ovid’s poem tend to be visited upon on male rather than female bodies.47 In a now classic article, Nancy Vickers reads Petrarch’s obsessive fetishizing of isolated parts of Laura’s body (her eyes, hair, hands, and so on) as a defensive manoeuvre: the male poet’s way of deflecting back onto his own chaste goddess the punitive ­dis­memberment that, in the Metamorphoses, Diana had meted out upon Actaeon.48 According to the logic of this argument, any threat to the male author’s bodily integrity and phallic wholeness is thus recuperated by means of a compensatory violence and rhetorical mastery: a dialectical model in which any hint of or potential for vulnerability on the part of the male subject ultimately serves to reinforce the most stereotypical of gender norms.49 As noted earlier, however, to appeal to the already gendered body in this way is to presuppose and naturalize categories that are entirely cultural: a literally “preposterous” move insofar as it puts effect before cause and anachronistically projects sexual difference back onto the poly­ morphous and abject state of the “body in pieces” from which the gender binary comes. Yet it is precisely to this prior state of sexual “indifference” that Ovid and his Renaissance imitators seem obsessively drawn, returning to what Enterline calls that “moment in all our lives when bodies have yet to acquire their culturally assigned meaning, when sexual difference … makes no sense.”50 One example that comes to mind is the lengthy blazon that Pyrocles sings to his beloved Philoclea in Sidney’s New Arcadia. The poem itemizes the beloved’s various “parts” quite as obsessively as anything in Petrarch, but not with a view to setting up the body of the poet as phallic, whole, or male by way of comparison. To start with, Pyrocles is disguised as an Amazon (“Zelmane”) at the time, is ­wearing a dress, and is referred to by a female pronoun throughout (“she” has been in this state for some time and remains so for the  remainder  of the, admittedly unfinished, romance). Second, although she sings while playing a lute (equivalent to the Orphic/ Apollonian lyre), her blazon takes place on the banks of the river Ladon: the very ­location where, in the Metamorphoses, Pan chases Syrinx and ends up making music from the reeds or panpipes into which she is transformed. Third, and in keeping with the imminent dispersal or injuring of the Orphic/Apollonian poet which these Ovidian allusions predict, Zelmane is no masterly author but herself a loose and abject conglomeration of “parts” (“eyes,” “wit,” “voice,” “hands,” and “feet”) which sing and move in time, not driven by cool

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reason but “with a divine fury inspired.”51 Lunatic, lover, and poet: of imagination all compact. It seems appropriate to conclude with Shakespeare, not least because, in its imitation of Ovid, his poetry exemplifies the play between sameness and difference I have been tracing throughout this essay. Citing Petrarch’s advice that the imitating poet should ideally relate to his models as son to father, Jonathan Bate notes that “Shakespeare’s Ovidianism answers to Petrarch’s ideal: there are dissimilarities as well as resemblances.”52 Where the plays, between them, make reference to all fifteen books of the Metamorphoses (demonstrating Shakespeare’s thorough familiarity with Ovid’s poem), the sonnets, for their part, largely restrict their range of reference to the final book, with its long speech by Pythagoras and Ovid’s culminating claim to fame: “(If poets as by prophecy about the truth may aim) / My life shall everlastingly be lengthened still by fame.”53 This narrowing of focus, however, indicates not so much a lessening of Ovid’s influence as an intensification of it – for one critic, Shakespeare effectively includes “a précis of Ovid’s entire poem within his sequence” – and this becomes clear if one singles out the experience of writing poetry as one of the sonnets’ major themes.54 If, as another critic suggests, the Metamorphoses is to a large extent “a poem about writing poetry,” then Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence might be said to be “Ovidian” to the same degree.55 For it, too, explores the experience of poesis not only as this appears in Ovid but also in Shakespeare’s own relationship to Ovid, not to mention his relationship to other poetic fathers who also happen to be Ovidian “sons,” such as Petrarch. Since the sonnet sequence was a genre unknown to Ovid, Shakespeare’s text exemplifies the aemulatio that, Bate notes, “leaves room for ­dissimilitude as well as similitude” (87), and much the same might be said of the many departures his sequence makes from Petrarchan convention. One could therefore see the poetic themes I have been tracing here – of inspiration as a transformative encounter with a superior power; of imitation as an impossible median between excesses of sameness and difference (both equally perverse) – as being worked out in Shakespeare’s Young Man sonnets, preoccupied as they are with a poetry-inspiring beloved who belongs to the same gender but a different class. For Kenneth Burke, these sonnets characterise the mysterious, “courtly” relations that exist between individuals of ­contrasting social status: relations that are “analogous to sexual expression” and thus like “the ways of courtship, rape, seduction,

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jilting, prostitution, promiscuity, with variants of sadistic torture or mas­ochistic invitation to mistreatment.”56 Burke does not mention Ovid here but his account could serve very well as a summary of the Metamorphoses, where relations between beings of a different class – between different classes of being – are just so described. Ovid presents sameness and difference in terms of incommensurable relations between humans, animals, and gods; Shakespeare, in terms of incommensurable relations between a male lover and a male beloved (too similar?), and between a social inferior and his social superior (too different?): both axes of the relation querying the kind of love poetry it is appropriate for the “masculine” author to write. Where the issue is, essentially, that the parties in question do not speak the same language, the necessity for translation arises: the need for meaning to be “carried across” what are otherwise incompatible categories (for metaphor, in a word), which is why such relations are so often presented as problematic, poetic, and perverse. By doing something that neither Ovid nor Petrarch did (write a sonnet sequence; address it to a man), Shakespeare differentiates himself from his poetic forefathers, while sharing with them an equal fascination for sameness, difference, and the abject impossibility of discriminating between the two. Thus, what Ovid and Petrarch figure as human characters who find themselves sounding like animals or like gods, Shakespeare figures as a poet who finds himself sounding like other poets. He virtually quotes Ovid’s Pythagoras, for example, when suggesting that the poet’s productions can never be his own but only reproductions of his progenitors’ productions. A perverse model of poetic generation in which categorical distinctions (male/female, hetero-/homo-, father/ son) are typically confused: If there be nothing new, but that which is Hath been before, how are our brains beguil’d, Which laboring for invention bear amiss The second burthen of a former child!57 What Ovid and Petrarch figure as an alien breath issuing from the poet’s mouth, Shakespeare figures as the poet’s breath issuing from the alien mouths of future readers as they recite his sonnets for generations to come. He reassures his beloved that “You still shall live (such virtue hath my pen) / Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men.”58 The fame of lover and beloved is thereby

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assured, but their monument is an airy one indeed (as tentative and conditional as Ovid’s claim this his name and fame will likewise endure if the prophecies of poets are true), and there is no end of alienation in sight. Not e s  1 Ovid’s Metamorphoses, trans. Arthur Golding (1567), ed. Madeleine Forey (Harmondsworth: Penguin 2002), I.7, 9, 20. Hereafter, Golding’s sixteenth-century translation will be referred to as Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The Latin text and modern translation, Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller, rev. G.P. Goold, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1916), will be referred to simply as Metamorphoses.   2 From the Aryan gen-, gon-, gn-, “to produce, engender, beget,” derive Sanskrit jánas, Greek γένος, γόνος, γίγνομαι, and Latin genus, gignere, etc. Related is Old Germanic *kunjom from which derives kin (and, subsequently, kind). In the Germanic word, as in Latin genus and Greek γένος, three main senses appear: race or stock; class or kind; and gender or sex. See OED generation n., gender n., genus n., kin n.1, and kind n.   3 In classical Latin, genius referred to the male spirit of a family, existing in the head of the family and subsequently in the divine or spiritual part of each individual; in literature it came to refer to talent, inspiration, a person endowed with talent, also a demon or spiritual being; the word ultimately derives from gignere (to beget). See OED genius n. and adj.  4 Ovid, Metamorphoses, I.57, 79, 21.   5 Ibid., VI.1-145.   6 Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 5.   7 Richard A. Lanham, The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 62. “Genre,” of course, derives from the same etymological root.   8 From classical Latin generalis, meaning shared by or common to the whole of a class or kind, generic, forming a group or class, of universal application. See OED general adj. and n.   9 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 4. 10 Ibid., 98. 11 Du Bartas, The Divine Weeks and Works of Guillaume de Saluste Sieur du Bartas, trans. Josuah Sylvester (1605–1608), ed. Susan Snyder (Oxford:

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Oxford University Press, 1979), 2 vols, “The First Day of the First Weeke,” lines 89-92. The quotation refers to the deity on the first day of creation in Sylvester’s translation of Du Bartas’s celebrated hexameral epic. Milton’s account of creation belongs to the same tradition of divine male fiat. As reported by Raphael to Adam and Eve, God addresses the Son thus: “‘And thou my Word, begotten Son, by thee / This I perform, speak thou, and be it done: / My overshadowing spirit and might with thee / I send along, ride forth, and bid the deep / Within appointed bounds be heaven and earth …’ So spake the almighty, and to what he spake / His Word, the filial Godhead, gave effect,” Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler (London: Longman, 1971), VII.163-7, 174-5. 12 See Lynn Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). 13 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 64. 14 Ibid., 106. 15 Ibid., 77. 16 Lynn Enterline, The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 35; italics original. 17 Ibid., 86. 18 Leonard Barkan, Transuming Passion: Ganymede and the Erotics of Humanism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 22. 19 Raphael Lyne, Ovid’s Changing Worlds: English Metamorphoses, 1567‑1632 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 2. 20 Gordon Braden, The Classics and English Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), xiii. 21 Golding, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, XIV.126-7. 22 Ibid., VIII.282. For an extensive account of avian myths of poetic inspiration as derived from Ovid and deployed by a Renaissance poet, see Patrick Cheney, Spenser’s Famous Flight: A Renaissance Idea of a Literary Career (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993). 23 See e.g. Don Fowler, “Masculinity under Threat? The Poetics and Politics of Inspiration in Latin Poetry,” and Alison Sharrock, “An A-musing Tale: Gender, Genre, and Ovid’s Battles with Inspiration in the Metamorphoses,” both in Cultivating the Muse: Struggles for Power and Inspiration in Classical Literature, ed. Efrossini Spentzou and Don Fowler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 141–59 and 207–27, respectively. 24 The story of how Apollo takes to his lyre after losing Daphne is followed by – and implicitly paired with – the story of how Pan acquires his panpipes after losing Syrinx: “Instead of her he caught the reeds new grown upon the brook, / And as he sighèd with his breath the reeds he softly

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shook / Which made a still and mourning noise, with strangeness of the which / And sweetness of the feeble sound the god, delighted much,” Ovid’s Metamorphoses, I.880-3. The connecting story tells how the panpipes played by Mercury had the power to close Argus’s hundred eyes and send him to sleep (see I.842-54). Apollo’s confidence in the superiority of his instrument is belied by the disproportionate violence he metes out to the satyr, Marsyas, in a contest over the reedpipe (see VI.487-510). In a series of interlinked tales, Orpheus and his lyre are violently destroyed by the Maenads, after which King Midas (who like the latter also worships Bacchus) judges Pan’s pipe music preferable to Apollo’s lyre in another contest between the two, notwithstanding the fact that the sun god “was the very pattern of a good musician right” (XI.189). Apollo gives Midas a pair of ass’s ears by way of revenge, but again the punishment does not quite do the job of subordinating the power of the rival instrument: Midas’s barber breathes the secret of the king’s affliction into the ground from which “a tuft of quivering reeds” promptly springs, broadcasting the damning words “when the gentle southern wind did lightly on them blow” (XI.212, 214). 25 “In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas / corpora; di, coeptis (nam vos mutastis et illas) / adspirate meis primaque ab origine mundi / ad mea perpetuum deducite tempora carmen!” [My mind is bent to tell of bodies changed into new forms. Ye gods, for you yourselves have wrought the changes, breathe on these my undertakings, and bring down my song in unbroken strains from the world’s very beginning even unto the present time.], Metamorphoses, I.1-4. Golding does not render the sense of breath in his translation. 26 Enterline, Rhetoric of the Body, 50 (italics original). 27 Ibid., 121. 28 Battus is charged by Mercury with concealing the latter’s theft of Apollo’s oxen and transformed into flint or touchstone when tricked into revealing the secret (see Metamorphoses, II.687-707; touchstone was traditionally used in the assaying of precious metals); Byblis is unable to refrain from telling her brother (a grandson of Apollo) the secret of her incestuous passion for him and is transformed into a fountain (IX.454-665); Actaeon is prevented from communicating his sight of the naked Diana (Apollo’s sister) by being transformed into a stag (III.138-252); Echo fails to tell Juno of Jove’s adulterous amours, using speech to distract and detain the goddess rather than to tell the truth, and is reduced to repeating others’ words, becoming a mere echo when Narcissus spurns her love (III.354401); Cygnus becomes a swan out of grief for the death of his kinsman,

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Phaëthon (Apollo’s son) (II.367-80); Apollo’s first love, Daphne, flees his advances and is turned into a laurel, becoming the occasion for the god’s song and poetry thereafter and an emblem of its glory and his triumph (I.452-567). 29 Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime sparse and Other Lyrics, ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling (Cambridge, M A: Harvard University Press, 1976), canzone 23, line 89. 30 Enterline, Rhetoric of the Body, 56; Daniel D. Moss, The Ovidian Vogue: Literary Fashion and Imitative Practice in Late Elizabethan England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 75. 31 In addition to works by Barkan, Braden, Cheney, Lyne, and Moss cited above, see also: Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); Colin Burrow, “Re-embodying Ovid: Renaissance Afterlives,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, ed. Philip Hardie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 301–19; Georgia Brown, Redefining Elizabethan Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Patrick Cheney, Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession: Ovid, Spenser, Counter-­Nationhood (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997); Syrithe Pugh, Spenser and Ovid (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); M.L. Stapleton, Spenser’s Ovidian Poetics (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2009); and Marlowe’s Ovid: The Elegies in the Marlowe Canon (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014). 32 See Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). 33 Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, or The Defence of Poesy, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd, revised by R.W. Maslen (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 3rd ed., 2002), 82. 34 See Charles Segal, Orpheus: The Myth of the Poet (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989); and Heather Dubrow, The Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). On the tendency of Renaissance poets to deviate from the civic project of their humanist educators, see Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom. 35 Catherine Nicholson, Uncommon Tongues: Eloquence and Eccentricity in the English Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 5. On the respective career-models of Spenser and Marlowe, see Cheney, Spenser’s Famous Flight and Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession: Spenser, Ovid, Counter-Nationhood (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997). 36 Golding, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, XI.76.

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37 See Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984); and Mutlu Konuk Blasing, Lyric Poetry: The Pain and the Pleasure of Words (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 38 Elizabeth Sewell, The Orphic Voice: Poetry and Natural History (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), 59, citing Shakespeare, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, III.ii.77. All references to Shakespeare to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2nd ed., 1997). 39 Golding, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, XI.54. 40 For the tales of Cyparissus and Hyacinthus, see Metamorphoses, X.106-42 and 162-219; for the Sibyl, see note 21 above; for Pan, Mercury, and Marysas, see note 24 above. 41 In revenge for her infidelity, Apollo shoots Coronis and takes the unborn Aesculapius from her dead body, giving the infant to Chiron (a centaur, physician, and poet) to bring up. In a fit of ecstatic frenzy, Chiron’s ­daughter prophesies that the child will grow up to be a great healer with the power to restore the dead to life, in punishment for which he will in turn be killed by the gods yet strangely be made a god again (see Metamorphoses, II.542-675). Once adult, Aesculapius heals the utterly broken body of Hippolytus, restoring the youth to life so that he is known thereafter as Virbius or “twice a man” (XV.533-44). 42 Ovid’s Elegies, I.i.20-2, in Christopher Marlowe, The Complete Poems and Translations, ed. Stephen Orgel (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971). 43 Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, 90; Spenser, Amoretti, 28; Drayton, Idea, 47, in Elizabethan Sonnets, ed. Maurice Evans (London: Dent, 1994). “Delia,” the title of Daniel’s sonnet sequence, means “Of Delos,” the island sacred to Apollo (it also incorporates an anagram of “Ideal” and a – typically Sidneian – name-play on “Da[n]iel”). 44 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, I.Pro.3, ed. A.C. Hamilton et al. (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2nd ed., 2007). 45 Ibid, I.Pro.1, 2, 4. See also Catherine Bates, Masculinity and the Hunt: Wyatt to Spenser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 177–8, 297–301. 46 In the cinquecento debate over epic sparked by the Orlando Furioso, Giraldi Cinthio defends the latter as a romance on the grounds that Ariosto drew on the Metamorphoses for his variety and digressions: see On Romances, trans. Henry L. Snuggs (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1968), 20, 23, 40–1, 46–7, 53.

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47 Charles Segal, “Ovid’s Metamorphic Bodies: Art, Gender, and Violence in the Metamorphoses,” Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics 5.3 (1998): 32, 9–41. 48 Nancy J. Vickers, “Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme,” Critical Inquiry 8.2 (1981): 265–79. 49 See Sarah Carter, Ovidian Myth and Sexual Deviance in Early Modern English Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 50 Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom, 71, discussing Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. Given its deliberate de-heroizing of poet and protagonist, the sub-genre of the epyllion is especially prone to the “recuperative” ­dialectical reading described above, making Enterline’s corrective move particularly helpful. 51 Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (the New Arcadia), ed. Victor Skretkowicz (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 190. See Catherine Bates, Masculinity, Gender and Identity in English Renaissance Lyric (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 89–135 for a full discussion of this poem. 52 Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid, 88, referring to Petrarch’s letter to Boccaccio, dated 28 October 1366. 53 Golding, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, XV.994-5. 54 Gordon Braden, “Ovid, Petrarch, and Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” in Shakespeare’s Ovid: The Metamorphoses in the Plays and Poems, ed. A.B. Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 106, 96–112. 55 Charles Martindale, “Introduction,” in Ovid Renewed: Ovidian Influences on Literature and Art from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century, ed. Charles Martindale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 15, 1–20. 56 Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (New York: Prentice Hall, 1950), 115. 57 Shakespeare, Sonnet 59; compare Ovid’s Metamorphoses XV.279-81: “For that which we / Do term by name of being born is for to gin to be / Another thing than that it was.” 58 Shakespeare, Sonnet 81.

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3 Ovid in Love and War: Pacifist Masculinity in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis John S. Garrison

In Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1593), the goddess of love deploys a variety of tactics to convince the young hunter to concede to her sexual advances. Among these tactics is personal recollection, as she recounts an earlier occasion when she seduced Mars. The inclusion of Venus’s reverie about this coupling contributes to how Shakespeare retells but also adapts Ovid’s Metamorphoses.1 While the story of the affair between Venus and Mars can be found in Ovid’s epic poem, it is described separately from the story of Venus and Adonis. Shakespeare interpolates the encounter between the gods into the larger narrative of his poem, thereby inviting us to consider how one pairing throws the other into relief. The Renaissance poet embellishes the ancient version as he shows Mars abandoning his war-like ways and taking up courtly behaviours to appeal to his lover, Venus. Shakespeare exercises his poetic authority here, as he places the Ovidian Mars in the role of the subjugated lover that is so prevalent among Renaissance sonneteers. In doing so, Shakespeare reinforces some early modern views about pacifism as emasculating, yet he clearly charges the scene with strong erotic energies. In portraying a mode of identity where pacifist behaviour can be aligned with a rewarding expression of masculinity, this adaptation of Ovid’s story dovetails with early modern ideas about positive forms of masculinity that need not be tied to military heroics.2 Just after Adonis refuses Venus’s offer of a kiss and gives her a wink instead, the goddess begins a three-stanza anecdote detailing how she

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once tamed Mars, the embodiment of war himself. This tale expands upon a brief mention of the affair in Book IV of the Metamorphoses (4.167-89).3 Ovid’s version focuses on the cuckolding aspect of the story, giving us no real sense of the romance between the two gods before Venus’s husband Vulcan brings the affair to light by snaring her and Mars in a net made of wire. In Arthur Golding’s 1567 translation of the ancient poem, we hear that Now when that Venus and hir mate were met in bed togither Hir husband by his newfound snare before convayed thither Did snarle them both togither fast in middes of all theyr play And setting ope the Ivorie doores, callde all the Gods streight way To see them: they with shame inough fast lockt togither lay. A certaine God among the rest disposed for to sport Did wish that he himselfe also were shamed in that sort. The resdue laught and so in heaven there was no talke a while, But of this Pageant how the Smith the lovers did beguile. (4.185-93)4 Golding’s translation suggests a humorous anecdote, as the terms “play,” “sport,” and “pageant” set up the reader for the laughter of the other gods in reaction to the scene. Though the lovers might feel “shame,” even that negatively charged word is taken lightly as one of the witnessing gods wishes himself to be shamed in an erotic union with one of the members – or perhaps both of the members – of the adulterous couple. The event seems nothing more than fodder for arousal, laughter, and gossip. However, in the volume’s introductory epistle to the Earl of Leicester, Golding glosses the tale this way: “The snares of Mars and Venus shew that tyme will bring to light / The secret sinnes that folk commit in corners or by nyght.”5 The introductory remarks connect this tale and a handful of other tales directly to questions of masculinity, as the stories supposedly show how lust and sin “make men to be effeminate, unwieldy, weake, and lither.” Ian Frederick Moulton observes that Golding’s framing of these stories in the epistle “stresses their value as cautionary tales” because “Ovid provides a useful warning against effeminate lust.”6 Shakespeare seems to offer a more nuanced view, which echoes only to some degree the association of Mars’s lust with the negative valences of emasculation. Such forms of erotics, we will see, can be tied to pacifism.

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The interaction between Venus and Mars embraces a queer calculus in which love’s operations of compromise, negotiation, and sacrifice might be able to quell masculine violence and give us a glimpse of a gentler male subject. Throughout this chapter, I will draw upon the ways that queer theory can generate new readings of early modern texts. As Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner note in a seminal essay on queer studies, the approach can generate readings focused on “cultures of reception,” “the costs of closure,” “the pleasure of unruly subplots,” “voicing strategies,” and “identification and other readerly relations to texts and discourse.”7 I find that the Venus and Mars interlude offers a notably concrete case study for the conflation these items, as Venus speaks for a younger version of herself, quite separate from the main action of the poem, with a story containing complex messages for Adonis and for Shakespeare’s humanist readers.8 An analysis of the purchase of the gods’ interaction on issues of masculinity thus builds upon Goran Stanivukovic’s arguments about Adonis status as a “queer” figure, given the “effeminate” nature of his position in relation to Venus.9 In the light of the goddesses’ savviness about both the rhetoric and the operations of love, we can see why M.L. Stapleton suggests that Ovid’s Ars Amatoria represents a crucial intertext for Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. Tracing the influence of Ovid’s guide to love on the poem, Stapleton identifies Venus as a teacher and Adonis as a student who finds himself under the harsh spell of a “tormentor’s didacticism.”10 The story of Venus and Adonis, as well as the embedded subplot of Venus and Mars, would remind early modern readers of the stories encountered in the humanist classroom. And, as Lynn Enterline’s work has shown us so vividly, reading and re-articulating Ovidian narratives was central to the early modern schoolroom’s “social production of eloquent masculinity.”11 The notion that the poem both depicts a learning environment and is meant as a learning tool finds support in Bruce R. Smith’s claim that “able to read Latin, highly self-conscious of their distance from ‘the crowd,’ appreciative of salacious poems inspired by Ovid, the readership of Venus and Adonis is to be identified most closely with the young gentlemen (and gentlemen-to-be) of the inns of court.”12 Indeed, it is not hard to see this long poem of persuasion offering titillating and useful entertainments for those intending to become lawyers and other noblemen bound for court. We can imagine that Venus, who has encountered Adonis in the midst of hunting, might think martial analogies would persuade him.

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Wouldn’t a hunter want to emulate the paradigm of male martiality: the god of war himself? If human erotism is – as Georges Bataille has suggested – “assenting to life up to the point of death” – then a tale of Mars’s experience of a sexual pleasure that renders him willingly subjugated could sound like an apex erotic experience previously possible for Adonis only as fantasy.13 Mars is captive here not of battle but to his own desires, experiencing new forms and degrees of pleasure that subjugate him to his own longing for the pleasure that Venus represents. Shakespeare’s poem thus re-works Ovid’s comedy – which becomes moralizing comedy in Golding’s view – into erotic reverie brimming with new possibility. In doing so, Venus and Adonis makes the case to early modern readers for a male power – both poetic and courtly – that can emerge when war-like ways are abandoned and the lover succumbs to the inevitability captured in the well-known phrase from Virgil: amor vincit omnia, love conquers all. Venus begins her tale by telling Adonis that: I have been woo’d, as I entreat thee now, Even by the stern and direful god of war, Whose sinewy neck in battle ne’er did bow, Who conquers where he comes in every jar; [...] And begg’d for that which thou unask’d shalt have. (97-102)14 The stunning scene that follows emphasizes the formidability of Mars as an opponent, yet his initial status named here as “direful” casts him not only as terrible and threatening but also unhappy and “mournful,” a connotation which the Oxford English Dictionary tells us “dire” carried in the early modern period. So, to be “dire” is to be in a state of loss, a state of lack. This is not simply a brief encounter where Mars might have his needs gratified. Rather, it constitutes an opportunity to break old habits and find a new way of being in relation to someone else. Lauren Berlant suggests that “love is one of the few situations where we desire to have patience for what isn’t working, an affective binding that allows us to iron things out, or to be elastic, or to try a new incoherence.”15 Venus and Adonis depicts love’s propensity to call into question the violent underpinnings of male identity and to shape new modes of behaviour as classical, martial paradigms

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for masculinity are re-imagined in the early modern, courtly sphere.16 Mars thus becomes an analogue for figures such as Philip Sidney or Edmund Spenser, whose masculine status allowed for them to claim renown both as soldiers on the battlefield and writers of love poems.17 Yet this re-envisioned Mars offers a more peace-affirming figure than these Renaissance courtiers who nonetheless intermittently returned to the battlefield. The poem goes further than simply reinforcing the early modern ideal of a soldier who can also be a lover, however, as it argues that rejection of war can be a masculine pursuit. It is interesting that Venus opens her anecdote with a description of herself as having been “wooed.” That is, Mars retains the active position even amidst compromise. Indeed, details in the scene, such as this one, imply that he neither is fully emasculated nor does he fully renounce martiality. Shakespeare imagines a more nuanced dynamic between the spheres of love and war rather than the binary logic we hear in Barnabe Rich’s opening epistle to his 1581 Farewell to Militarie Profession where he announces that “having myself wholly unto Mars: should now in my riper yeeres desire to live in peace amongst women and to consecrate myself wholly unto Venus.”18 Shakespeare gives us something more subtle, where it is not simply that Venus, peace, love, and the effeminate collapse into a single category. Mars does not need to return occasionally to the battlefield to confirm his masculinity. Although the poet’s scene is new, it is still true to what Catherine Bates describes as “an identifiably Ovidian formulation” where “the roles of huntress and hunted classically collapse into one.”19 Francis Bacon’s 1612 essay “Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates” aligns masculinity with warfare and associates pacifism with laziness and feminization: “war is like the heat of exercise, and serveth to keep the body in health; for in a slothful peace, both courages will effeminate and manners corrupt.”20 Shakespeare offers an alternative paradigm. These two may stay in bed, but they are quite active there. Rather than their manners corrupting, the work of peace involves refining manners. Bacon of course makes a pun here, as “manners” (a term to describe “good social conditions or customs” and “a person’s characteristic style of attitude, gesture, or speech”) contributes to the identity of what it means to be a “man” who avoids corrupting feminization. Shakespeare’s interlude, then, offers an alternative to the ending of the poem where Venus promises that love will be the source of war in the future. It thus falls into a strand of thought that Melissa E.

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Sanchez has traced in Renaissance literature which “sees all human desire, in all of its glorious perversity, as the source of political order, not its enemy.”21 As we see Mars replacing martial pastimes with courtly ones, we see a dramatization of Erasmus’s notion in the 1521 The Complaint of Peace that pacifist strategies are a “means worthy of imitation” for influencing kings.22 Thus, these practices have power and – in their ability to influence rulers and in the sense that they are able to be imitated – reside comfortably in the space of the court.23 Venus makes clear that the newfound erotic pleasures she promises to Adonis need not be a simple respite from hunting or battle; it wasn’t just a one-night stand for the god of war. Mars was ready to give up his fighting ways and exchange them for a life of love-making. The goddess describes how Over my altars hath he hung his lance, His batter’d shield, his uncontrolled crest, And for my sake hath learn’d to sport and dance, To toy, to wanton, dally, smile and jest, Scorning his churlish drum and ensign red, Making my arms his field, his tent my bed. (103-8) Bowing to love’s power, Mars migrates from a state of being “uncontrolled” to one characterized by choreographed courtly behaviours as he learns “sport and dance.” It is a type of personal transformation that strikes me as neither necessarily forward nor necessarily backward. Certainly, the god of war leaves behind childish, or “churlish,” things in order to access pastimes that are less damaging and much more pleasurable. Yet Mars’s new way of life, as characterized by the verb “dally,” invokes the playfulness and lack of urgency we might associate with childhood. The transformation, then, seems subtended by what Katherine Bond Stockton describes as “growing sideways,” a notion that helpfully queers – or suspends – our normative impulse to see change as teleological and invites us to consider “ways of growing that are not always growing up.”24 Note also the complexity of the final line. Mars is “Making my arms his field.” She does not say “battlefield,” so we can imagine a new form of relationality here devoid of violence. She then uses a form of chiasmus by closing with “his tent my bed.” The expected formulation of the line would be “Making my arms his field, my bed his tent.” But the alternative formulation

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suggests the operations of exchange and mutuality. They have accessed that state which Freud suggests is only possible for those in love: where the I and the you become one.25 The love-match is not without its sacrifices for Mars. “Wanton” might imply a freedom from worry or might imply waste as denoted “to pass one’s time carelessly” or “to go idly or heedlessly.” “Dally,” too, was multivalent in the early modern period, meaning both “flirtation” and “to talk or converse lightly or idly; to chat.” Such discourse might be appealing in the bedroom but might not appeal to those seeking to rise in the court. Early modern readers might laugh at the idea of so masculine an archetype being subjugated by a woman. Yet they would also see the erotic appeal of coupling with the paradigm of love herself. They might also note that by authoring the scene, Venus has control over the narrative. We do not hear Mars’s voice in this anecdote. While Shakespeare claims poetic authority by rewriting Ovid, so too does Venus by describing only her side of a tale wherein the goddess of love defeated the god of war. Turning her attention back to Adonis, Venus implores “O be not proud, nor brag not of thy might, / For mastering her that foiled the god of fight” (113-14). Shakespeare evocatively engages multiple meanings of “foiled” in the last line here. One interpretation, of course, is that Mars has been “defeated”: that he has now succumbed to the stronger side of Venus. However, Love is also War’s foil, less an opposing force and more a gentler, more nuanced, and ultimately more rewarding mirror image. And there is an erotic pun here, too. Mars will not have to give up his swordsmanship, in the sense that foil is the dueller’s version of the weapon but meant for sport and play. This is competition and exhilaration without damage, without deadly consequence. Her tale has been, at least in part, about how giving mastery over to one’s desires is a private pleasure of its own. Shakespeare gives us a very different picture of the gods’ coupling than Ovid does, both because his depiction focuses on the events before the humiliation scene featured in the Metamorphoses and because it focuses on the pleasure of the affair. Given that Shakespeare’s poem offers an alternate ending to Ovid’s tale of Venus’s encounter with Adonis, it is entirely possible that Shakespeare intends his tale of Venus and Mars to have an alternate ending as well. In Ovid, Adonis experiences erotic coupling with Venus before he dies and then is given immortal life as a flower. Shakespeare’s Adonis never couples with Venus, and the flower that sprouts from his blood immediately

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dies before its child is born. Although Shakespeare’s version of that couple’s tale represents an arguably more negative outcome than Ovid’s, his version of Venus and Mars’s relations is more positive. Indeed, the immortal, masculine subject remains unscathed in Shakespeare’s tale. Madhavi Menon argues that we should resist a reading of the poem that affirms teleology, that we should set aside our desire to look for success in the poem or to organize it around terms of early, late, or complete.26 But such an approach can be helpful for interpreting the interlude with Venus and Mars. The fact that we don’t know what became of this affair makes it all the more appealing. Perhaps it continued into the period of Venus’s wooing of Adonis. Perhaps it lasted for only a few hours, days, or years. The space of the immortals – with their unusual relationship to time – allows us to embrace supernatural possibilities or to dismiss the possibilities as unknowable. Another instance in ancient literature does give us a glimpse of what Venus and Mars’s lovemaking would have looked like. Lucretius’s version in De Rerum Natura emphasizes what we might be trained to expect in the coupling of opposites. The poem’s speaker addresses Venus and re-creates a moment when Mars O’ermastered by the eternal wound of love And there, with eyes and full throat backward thrown, Gazing, my Goddess, open-mouthed at thee, Pastures on love his greedy sight, his breath Hanging upon thy lips. Him thus reclined Fill with thy holy body, round, above! (reiicit aeterno devictus vulnere amoris, atque ita suspiciens tereti cervice reposta pascit amore avidos inhians in te, dea, visus eque tuo pendet resupini spiritus ore. hunc tu, diva, tuo recubantem corpore sancto circum fusa super, suavis ex ore loquellas) (1.37-42)27 Here, as Lucretius’s speaker encourages Venus in her impressive ­display of power over Mars, the god of war is notably “o’ermastered,” a reversal of the expected dynamics of erotic subjugation, because the one who is typically dominant now submits. He then suffers an “eternal wound” and – in another reversal of typical gender roles – she

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“fills” him with her entire body. Shakespeare’s later depiction of Mars at play in the field of Venus’s arms thus takes an idea already implicit in Lucretius’s version of the encounter, where the god of war “pastures” (the Latin pascit) on what she has to offer. Venus and Adonis extrapolates this idea to be less about greedy consumption or forcefeeding and more closely aligned with Venus’s extended metaphor of her body as a park in which Adonis (as a deer) can wander as he likes. Shakespeare depicts a more nuanced interchange between the two gods. Rather than a role reversal, the early modern depiction will be a negotiation, an emergence of a new way of being. Shakespeare knew about this theory of desire captured by Lucretius, the one in which love thrives on conflict, collision, martiality, resistance, and the inevitability of heartache. In Coriolanus, for example, Aufidius greets Coriolanus with: “Let me twine / Mine arms about that body” because “more dances my rapt heart / Than when I first my wedded mistress saw / Bestride my threshold” (4.5.101-13).28 Or consider Henry’s speech at Agincourt where he says that those who did not join the fight will “hold their manhoods cheap” because they are not as masculine as the “band of brothers” whose ability to conquer in war will make them conquerors in the bedroom. Henry refuses what we might call a “Make Love, Not War” theory of desire, which would celebrate those men who stay at home. Mars must abandon fighting in order to achieve a more robust and dimensionalized form of masculine sexuality grounded in peace and peace-making. That might even be what Cupid is doing when he abandons his bow on the title page of a 1675 copy of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. The printer who published this now very-rare, pocket-sized edition opens the volume with this image, as if to say that the poem will be about abandoning weapons for other pastimes. While Shakespeare’s work is rife with Ovidian references, Venus and Adonis in particular offers an intriguing case study both because it was one of the author’s most popular works during his lifetime and because, as Sarah Annes Brown observes, “Ovidianism finds its most luxuriant expression in Venus and Adonis.”29 That is, the entire poem is an extended re-working of Ovid, and its decadent description of gendered relations makes it rich archive of language meditating on femininity and masculinity. In Shakespeare’s revision of the encounter between the goddess of love and god of war, Venus carries the same sense of overpowering even an immortal partner that we heard in Lucretius’s poem, but with

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Figure 3.1  Title Page from Venus and Adonis (1675). The Folger Shakespeare Library.

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crucial differences. Yes, Mars is described as her “captive” and “slave” (101). These certainly have negative connotations as they suggest loss in battle and subsequent loss of agency. Intriguingly, though, these terms of bondage (and the subsequent reference to a chain that ensnares Mars discussed below) take the terms of Vulcan’s net and reclaim them for erotic play. Importantly, Venus glosses the anecdote as one in which “he that over-ruled I over-swayed” (109). The two terms here – “over-rule” and “over-sway” – help us frame two modes of relation and of being. The former divorces love from consent. It applies external control as the OED defines it, as “to have absolute authority over,” whereas “oversway” means to “influence” or “persuade.” The shift between these terms helps us refine our understanding of what it might mean for Mars to have once obeyed “strong-tempered steel” but now be led by a chain made of red roses. His new life resembles the ritual of a range of choreographed social relations – from courtly performance to sadomasochistic roleplay to (in our own contemporary culture) ballroom dance. In the “over-sway,” a couple dramatically breaks the dance frame with extended legs and a dip to accentuate the romance inherent in the music and their partnership. This scene of performance underscores how in early modern culture, and in Shakespeare’s work specifically, we find a series of instances which suggest, in Bruce R. Smith’s words, that masculinity “is a matter of contingency, of circumstances, of performance.”30 The scripted rules of these non-martial relations – with their built-in room for improvisation – remind us that maintaining peace is active work. Perhaps the most memorable image in the encounter is Venus’s (and Shakespeare’s) image of a docile Mars whose submission culminates with the goddess “leading him prisoner in a red-rose chain” (110). I suppose one way to imagine this is a scenario where a metal chain is painted red in order to signify desire and femininity. However, elsewhere Shakespeare considers red to be as much Mars’s colour as Venus’s. In Troilus and Cressida, Troilus states that his love “shall be divulged well / In characters as red as Mars his heart / Inflamed with Venus” (17.158-60). Indeed, it is tempting to imagine the chain actually made of interlinked roses. He is not a “captive” in the sense of an unwilling combatant rendered ineffective. As noted above, Mars is the wooer in the encounter with Venus. William Keach observes, “Venus’ speeches often parody the conventions of Renaissance love poetry.”31 Thus the poem actively invites us to rethink gendered dynamics. Richard Rambus suggests that Venus “is constrained to enact all the amorous roles … to be both lover and would-be beloved,

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both blazoner and blazoned beauty.”32 While this explains the reversals between Adonis and the goddess, it does not extend the encounter between the gods. As Sarah Carter puts it, “Adonis is as fragmented as any excessively blazoned female object of desire.”33 Yet Mars’s body, identity, and masculinity remain more cohesive. The god may engage in some activities that reverse gender dynamics, but he still retains his status as a paradigmatic masculine figure. Such an interpretation dovetails with Shakespeare’s other uses of the figure of Mars. Aufidius, in the scene describes above, addresses his enemy and paramour as the god of war: Why, thou Mars! I tell thee, We have a power on foot, and I had purpose Once more to hew thy target from thy brawn, Or lose mine arm for’t. Thou hast beat me out Twelve several times, and I have nightly since Dreamt of encounters ’twixt thyself and me – We have been down together in my sleep, Unbuckling helms, fisting each other’s throat And waked half dead with nothing. (4.5.113-21) Later, however, Aufidius decides that Coriolanus is a coward. When Coriolanus calls out, “Hear’st thou, Mars?” Aufidius responds, “Name not the god, thou boy of tears!” (5.6.119-20). As Lisa S. Starks-Estes suggests, “the term ‘boy’ here, in an early modern context, may suggest not only a youth but also a womanly man or a sexually submissive sodomite – terms associated with femininity and vulnerable in both ancient Roman and early modern contexts, therefore highly charged insults to Coriolanus’ manhood.”34 Other instances in Shakespeare’s work acknowledge Mars as a paragon of masculinity, often in order to throw lesser men in relief. The eunuch Mardian, in Antony and Cleopatra, describes his affections as “fierce,” and notes as the height of sexual deeds “what Venus did with Mars” (I.v.540). The “Warlike Harry” will “assume the port of Mars” in Henry V (Prologue.8). Hamlet holds an image of his father and his uncle before Gertrude and equates Mars with King Hamlet and, by extension, with manhood: Look here upon this picture, and on this, The counterfeit presentment of two brothers.

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See what a grace was seated on this brow; Hyperion’s curls, the front of Jove himself, An eye like Mars, to threaten and command, A station like the herald Mercury New lighted on a heaven-kissing hill; A combination and a form, indeed, Where every god did seem to set his seal To give the world assurance of a man. (III.iv.51-60) The presence of Mars’s eye not only assures the world of the king’s power but also assures the world of the very existence of manhood. Yet in Sonnet 55, Shakespeare makes clear that a version of Mars who is primarily warlike cannot endure the coming of future ages: When wasteful war shall statues overturn, And broils root out the work of masonry, Nor Mars his sword, nor war’s quick fire shall burn The living record of your memory. (5-8) As Shakespeare appeals to his beloved, he urges him to consider modes of being that would reject martial endeavours and imagine other activities through which a man can attain fame. As noted briefly above, Mars’s masculinity is thrown into relief by  the only other male figure in the poem: Adonis. As Simone Chess notes, “Shakespeare goes out of his way to detail and describe Adonis’ androgyny.”35 Such a representation is a shift from Ovid’s Adonis, who is older than Shakespeare’s. The notion of an older, more masculine Adonis would align him more evidently with Mars. However, early modern writers clearly felt the freedom to play with these mythical figures in order to contemplate gendered behaviour. Indeed, Joseph Campana’s description of Edmund Spenser’s Adonis befits Shakespeare’s Mars: “Adonis exemplifies disarmed masculinity; he is the shape of masculinity in the suspension of violent conflict.”36 In Venus and Adonis as in The Faerie Queene, suspension of conflict is made possible by a man giving into his desire for a woman. Such dynamics do not reinforce strict gender binaries, however, as they suggest shared traits between male and female characters that make their coupling possible. Indeed, Tom MacFaul suggests that “Venus’

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very existence challenges masculinity, as Elizabeth I’s royal power did.”37 Mars suggests another challenge to conventional notions that align masculinity with aggressive individuals. Indeed, he may even predict the pacifist model of King James, the Rex Pacificus who modelled Erasmus’s vision for a ruler who would lionize peace as the ideal strategy for a nation’s success. When we reach the tragic end of the poem, we’re left with a sense that things might have ended differently.38 One cannot help but wonder if Venus promised Adonis entry not only into a realm of pacifist pleasures but also other forms of relation as well. Intriguingly, Venus never says that her affair with Mars ended, and her use of “hath” – the present indicative form of “to have” – to describe how Mars has changed for her leaves open the possibility that their relationship continues. And such a vision links to Ovid’s vision of idealized co-existence in the Golden Age. The Metamorphoses describes: Men knew none other countries yet, than where themselves did keepe: There was no towne enclosed yet, with walles and diches deepe. No horne nor trumpet was in use, no sword nor helmet worne, The worlde was such, that souldiers helpe might easly be forborne. (1.97-100)39 This idealized world, a world which some early moderns believed might return in their lifetimes, is a world without war or the military. This “myth functioning as a memory,” as Raymond Williams described the Golden Age.40 Recall that it is from Virgil that we derive the expression “love conquers all,” (amor vincet omnia). Virgil’s famous phrase, combined with his Eclogues, which promise that a period of lasting peace known as the Golden Age will come again, suggests that love might make men give up their warring ways. Indeed, Adonis might have become one of this new generation of males. The tragic end of the poem forecloses such possibilities.

Not e s   1 Just as Shakespeare’s Venus depicts the event in retrospect, Ovid has the tale recounted by Leuconoë.

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  2 The present chapter draws from and builds upon my earlier thinking about the poem. See John Garrison and Kyle Pivetti, Shakespeare at Peace (London and New York: Routledge, 2019), 77–80, and John Garrison, “Love Will Tear Us Apart: Campion’s Umbra and Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis,” in Elizabethan Narrative Poems: The State of Play, ed. Lynn Enterline (New York: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2019), 167–88.   3 The other prominent ancient source for tale would have been a very brief description in Book One of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura (1.29-40). This is addressed later in the essay.   4 References to Golding’s translation are drawn from the Perseus Project edition of Ovid, The xv. Books of P. Oudous Naso, entituled Metamorphosis, trans. Arthur Golding (London: William Seres, 1567).   5 References to the dedicatory epistle are drawn from Ovid, The xv. bookes of P. Ouidius Naso, entituled, Metamophosis, trans. Arthur Golding (London: John Windet and Thomas Judson, 1584), A3r. All other quotations from this version are taken from the Perseus Project version, described above.   6 Ian F. Moulton, “Arms and the Women: The Ovidian Eroticism of Harington’s Ariosto,” in Ovid and the Renaissance Body, ed. Goran V. Stanivukovic (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 119–20, 111–26.   7 Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “What Does Queer Theory Teach Us about X?” PMLA 110.3 (May 1995): 349, 343–9.  8 Venus and Adonis, as an epyllion, more closely aligns with the epic rather than the lyric genre after which our seminar is named – at least as far as the Aristotelian model holds. However, as a thought experiment, we can think of Shakespeare’s long poem as a series of lyric interludes. Venus’s various attempts at persuasion strike me as taking on differing voices and postures, and this dovetails nicely with the generic organizing principal that, as Jonathan Culler has recently put it: “lyric is spoken by a persona, whose situation and motivation one needs to reconstruct.” The various moments when Venus addresses Adonis instantiate lyric’s frequent expression of what Culler terms “triangulated address,” in which we find the poet “addressing the audience of readers by addressing or pretending to address someone or something else, a lover, a god, natural forces, or personified abstractions.” Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2015), 8.   9 Goran Stanivukovic interprets Adonis as a queer figure, one who would rather endure a gory death at the teeth of a vicious boar than give in to what he fears is too effeminate a position as Venus’s mortal lover. Goran

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V. Stanivukovic, “‘Kissing the Boar’: Queer Adonis and Critical Practice,” in Straight with a Twist: Queer Theory and the Subject of Heterosexuality, ed. Calvin Thomas (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 87–108. What I find compelling about this argument is the notion that what Venus offers is a queer form of love that resists the masculinist violence inherent in warfare or hunting. 10 On the subject of Ovid and early modern pedagogy, see also Stapleton’s essay in the present volume. M.L. Stapleton, “Venus as Praeceptor: The Ars Amatoria in Venus and Adonis,” in Venus and Adonis: Critical Essays, ed. Philip C. Colin (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 310, 311, 309–22. 11 Lynn Enterline, “Shakespeare’s Classicism, Redux,” in Shakespeare in Our Time: A Shakespeare Association of America Collection, ed. Dympna Callaghan and Suzanne Gossett (London and New York: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016), 270, 268–71. For further discussion of Ovid’s role in shaping masculinity in the early modern schoolroom, see M.L. Stapleton’s essay in the present volume. 12 Bruce R. Smith, Shakespeare and Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 135. 13 Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sexuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights Publishers, 1996), 23. 14 All references to Shakespeare’s poetry draw from William Shakespeare, The Oxford Shakespeare: Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Colin Burrow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 15 Lauren Berlant, “A Properly Political Concept of Love: Three Approaches in Ten Pages,” Cultural Anthropology 26.4 (Nov. 2011): 685, 683–91. 16 The notion that peace can be engendered by a personal change of heart motivated by romantic feelings can be found in the work of Erasmus, who saw peace beginning in the home because “war is nothing else but a private quarrel extended to others.” Desiderius Erasmus, Dulce bellum inexpertis, in The Adages of Erasmus, trans. Margaret Mann Phillips (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 322. For a compelling argument that the connections within and between families lead to ­stronger, peace-enabling bonds at larger levels of community and nation, see Elaine Boulding, Cultures of Peace (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000). 17 For a persuasive argument for “increasing devotion to the representation of masculine social agency as ‘civil’ rather than martial, and as celebrating victories of mental readiness rather than masculine courage,” see Lorna Hutson, The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women

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in Sixteenth-Century England (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 97, 91–114. 18 Barnabe Rich, Rich, A Farewell to Militarie Profession (London: Robert Walley, 1581). Quoted in Everett. Clare Everett takes this as evidence for a binary opposition between “the female-inscribed world with the masculine world of war.” Clare Everett, “Venus in Drag: Female Transvestism and the Construction of Sex Difference in Renaissance England,” in Venus and Mars: Engendering Love and War in Early Modern Europe, ed. Andrew Lynch and Philippa C. Madden (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1995), 199, 191–212. 19 Catherine Bates, Masculinity and the Hunt: Wyatt to Spenser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 253. 20 Francis Bacon, Francis Bacon: The Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 402. 21 Melissa E. Sanchez, Erotic Subjects: The Sexuality of Politics in Early Modern English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 10. 22 Desiderius Erasmus, The Complaint of Peace, Translated from the Querela Pacis (La Salle: Open Court, 1974), 46. 23 Todd W. Reeser has argued that, while “courage still remains a defining point of masculinity” in early modern culture, Erasmus’s The Complaint of Peace links an emergent interest in “moderate courage” with ideals of both masculinity and pacifism. See Moderating Masculinity in Early Modern Culture (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 159. 24 Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 11. 25 Freud describes falling in love as the moment when “the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away [and] a man who is in love declares that ‘I’ and ‘you’ are one.” Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey and ed. Peter Gay (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989), 13. 26 Madhavi Menon, “Spurning Teleology in Venus and Adonis,” GLQ : A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 11.4 (2005): 491–519. 27 The Latin and English for De Rerum Natura are drawn from the Perseus Project version: Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, ed. William Ellery Leonard. http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:latinLit:phi0550.phi001.perseuseng1:1.1–1.49 28 All references to Shakespeare’s plays draw from William Shakespeare, The New Oxford Shakespeare: Modern Critical Edition: The Complete Works, ed. Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus, and Gabriel Egan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

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29 Sarah Annes Brown, The Metamorhposis of Ovid: From Chaucer to Ted Hughes (London and New York: Bristol Classical Press [Bloomsbury Academic], 1999), 58. 30 Smith, Shakespeare and Masculinity, 4. 31 William Keach, Elizabethan Erotic Narratives: Irony and Pathos in the Ovidian Poetry of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Their Contemporaries (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1977), 92. 32 Richard Rambuss, “What It Feels Like for a Boy: Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis,” in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, Volume IV: The Poems, Problem Comedies, Late Plays, ed. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2003), 247, 240–58. 33 Sarah Carter, Ovidian Myth and Sexual Deviance in Early Modern English Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 155. 34 Lisa S. Starks-Estes, “Virtus, Vulnerability, and the Emblazoned Male Body in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus,” in Violent Masculinities: Male Aggression in Early Modern Texts and Culture, ed. Jennifer Feather and Cartherine E. Thomas (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 98, 85–108. 35 Simone Chess, “Male Femininity and Male-to-Female Crossdressing in Shakespeare’s Plays and Poems,” in Queer Shakespeare: Desire and Sexuality, ed. Goran Stanivukovic (London and New York: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2017), 231, 227–43. 36 Joseph Campana, The Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Masculinity (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 221. 37 Tom MacFaul, Poetry and Paternity in Renaissance England: Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne and Jonson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 148. 38 Or, the child of a flower. It is a depressing view of one kind of sexuality – the reproductive kind where pleasure is over in an instant and then the focus is on futurity. Unmoved by the poem’s nearly 1,000 lines of wooing, Adonis will make the mistake of resisting Venus because “Hunting he loved, but love he laugh’d to scorn.” 39 Ovid’s Latin reads, “Nondum praecipites cingebant oppida fossae; / non tuba directi, non aeris cornua flexi, / non galeae, non ensis erat: sine militis usu /mollia securae peragebant otia gentes.” All English quotations from the Metamorphoses are drawn from Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Arthur Golding (London: William Seres, 1567). All Latin quotations from the Metamorphoses are drawn from Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. and trans. Hugo Magnus (Gotha: Friedrich Andr. Perthes, 1892). Both are available through the Perseus Project. 40 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 43.

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4 The Faerie Queene’s Muses: “Hermaphrodites,” Masculine Education, and Inspiration Kyle Pivetti

If nothing else, Edmund Spenser should have appreciated the ambition of the Italian humanist Natale Conti. Across ten books, Conti assembled an exhaustive catalogue of ancient myth, detailing the contributions of numerous writers and tracing how mythological traditions persisted through the generations. The resultant Mythologiae (1567) clearly influenced Spenser, not just in the knowledge of ancient liter­ ature but in the literary methods at work. Conti approaches myth as allegorical, drawing out the inherent wisdom in stories of gods, nymphs, and heroes. Spenser noticed. As John Mulryan and Steven Brown argue, there is “overwhelming evidence that Edmund Spenser consulted Conti at every stage in the composition of The Faerie Queene.” 1 Conti begins with the assumption that the highly wrought fictions of mythology could provide valuable lessons for students, so long as they realized the purposeful deceptions of ancient writers. “In fact not so many years before the times of Plato, Aristotle, and other philosophers, the ancients did not openly teach the principles of philosophy,” writes Conti, “instead they found a secret mythological disguise for disseminating these truths.”2 Accessing the “principles of philosophy” requires secret understanding, the ability to see through the “mythological disguise” into an inherent truth. If Spenser hoped to “fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline,” he would have found a useful model in Mythologiae.3 At stake for Conti is a gender-based fear. He believed that while educated men could recognize the truths of philosophy, women and

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the uneducated required something else, creating a need for allegorical fictions and captivating stories. “It is obvious that women (as a group) and the unlettered crowd had to be taught religion, fear of the gods, respectability, and temperance; for they would neither understand the nature of the gods nor prefer integrity before theft and debauchery if they were not made to fear the gods. This is why the ancient sages devised mythical stories about the gods, and indeed built statues of mythological figures and painted picture of these deities that looked very much like monsters” (3–4). He argues that when contemporary audiences read myth with eyes only for the captivating narratives, they effectively read like “women.” He continues that those who do not see beyond the “mythological disguise” are “like small boys sitting around a winter fire, drinking in womanish trifles and little stories from the poets” (5). Mythologiae sets out to correct such errors, elucidating truths for a masculine audience able and ready to listen. Conti’s collection, framed as a response to the ignorance of “women and the unlettered crowd,” inspires, at least in part, The Faerie Queene, wherein Spenser too hopes “to fashion a gentleman” by pointing toward the Christian truths in stories otherwise dismissed as overtly feminine. In this chapter, I contrast Conti’s influence with another key source for Spenser’s narrative – Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Philip Hardie observes that The Faerie Queene is “full of episodes of metamorphosis and erotic passion, with numerous direct allusions to and re-workings of specific stories in the Metamorphoses.”4 Examples abound, from Malbecco’s hideous transformation, to mortal beings changed into trees, to the invocation of Hermaphrodite. The Faerie Queene is “the single greatest monument of the great surge of Ovidianism in Elizabethan literature that reached its peak in the 1590s.”5 Conti professes to uncover essential truths buried by male philosophers who distrusted feminine audiences. But what is the effect of a competing Ovidian impulse, one that so often delights in irony, contrast, and uncertainty? I take up that question through central figures of literary intention and divine guidance, the Muses in both Mythologiae and the Metamorphoses. Spenser credits the Muses with inspiring his epic poetry, meaning that they play an essential role in defining the allegorical methods at work. On the one hand, the Muses lend authority to his epic, guaranteeing the ancient wisdom inherent in it. On the other hand, Spenser often undercuts that same authority through wordplay that associates the Muses with feminine deception and enervation.6 This monument to Ovidianism, it turns out, troubles its

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gendered readership; it becomes the Hermaphrodite that closes Book III of the 1590 edition – male and female, active and passive – undermining the very values it would seem to espouse.

T o C o n t ro l t h e H earts of Men In Natale Conti’s framework, the Muses reinforce the protective functions ascribed to myth more generally. That is, their songs preservedd moral truths and served as a beacon to those who might otherwise wander from temperance and righteousness. “The Muses were supposed to watch over poets and were also reputed to be the true authors of all the songs that we have” (655), Conti writes. These Muses “kept an eye on anything that had some wisdom about it” (656). Being the daughters of Mnemosyne, they memorialized the great deeds and philosophical truths of the past that together provide moral guidance: “These goddesses are a great comfort to us when things are going badly, and they also inspire us to accomplish the kinds of things that can make us famous. For they deter us from unlawful passions and just about any kind of lust” (657). By reminding us of the historic acts of great figures, the Muses also dissuade their audience from sexual impropriety. These divine figures – feminine in nature – “mix so much sweetness with their wisdom that the ancients thought they were the best remedy we could use against all those tempting desires we have” (658–9). Like myth itself, the Muses were a cure ready to treat the diseases of human corruption. If the mind turns to unseemly lust, Conti’s Muses turn it the other way, to the moral rectitude implicit in ancient song. They remind their audiences of the temperance and rectitude that is otherwise so easily forgotten. Conti casts these values of temperance and rectitude as implicitly masculine, just as he imagines the larger project of Mythologiae preserving wisdom against the imagined ignorance of women and “the unlettered.” Their “songs were meant to fire up soldiers to go to war, to console good men when things were going badly for them, and to sing of glorious deeds and achievements so that people would be encouraged to strive for excellence by imitating such feats” (657). Conti links their songs specifically with martial action, and with consoling “good men.” To feel better, it seems, a man need only listen to songs about great warriors accomplishing great acts. The daughters of memory will happily answer the demand, “And since these songs

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would continually bring the glorious deeds of illustrious men to their [other heroes’] attention, this would give them the knowledge and the courage they needed to engage with the enemy” (657). Songs and heroic verse accomplish what examples of bravery alone cannot; they keep men focused on the masculine activities of war. But even off the battlefield, their audiences need the instruction. So “ancient poets and singers routinely claimed that their sweet songs could build character as well as control the hearts of men” (657). Again Conti stresses the needs of men, who can recognize greatness in the song and model their own behaviour accordingly. Spenser might not write for heroes or warriors explicitly, but the same educational aim extends even to civilian readers according to Conti. “In fact, in the Greek states children were taught the basics of poetry as soon as they reached adolescence. They didn’t sacrifice the delights of poetry in teaching it to the young, but they made sure that it was kept as pure and decent as possible” (657). In an earlier passage, Conti imagined small boys imbibing the “womanish trifles” of empty songs. With the Muses, the songs remain, but the moral intent is elevated. The songs of Mnemosyne’s daughters are as “pure and decent as possible,” of the same subjects that inspires heroic masculinity. According to Alison Keith, this vision of the Muses as schoolmasters is not so far removed from historical practice. The ancient schoolroom, she argues, provided young boys with fundamental lessons in masculinity, and the epic was often the vehicle of instruction. “Epic poetry was supremely valorized as a literary form centered on the principle of elite male identity (virtus) in the ancient Roman educational system, where the masculine focus of the genre was both mirrored and magnified. The ancient commentators articulate a traditional belief in the innate superiority of man over woman which they inculcate in their students.”7 Conti’s Muses nod in agreement. They sing songs of praiseworthy masculine deeds, and their audience shapes itself to fit that image. The mnemonic function of the songs reinforces the construction of gender. They help men to remember what makes them men.8 In his book on “Famous Men,” Conti insists that a functioning political state must reward virtuous practice with glory; otherwise, it incites laziness. Conti, then, associates the Muses’ inspiration with the mental activity necessary for masculine morality. He writes, “a man’s mind can’t exist in a condition of stasis. If it’s not doing something honest, it’s certainly going to be seduced into doing all kinds of

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things that are shameless and immoral. For if we close the doors to virtue, you can bet they’ll open up for vice and ugliness, unless the intelligent man protects himself by keeping his mind active and focused” (566). The “intelligent man” never succumbs to laziness but instead remembers the glory of famous men, those who model virtue for future generations. He keeps the mind “active and focused” by hearing songs about such exemplary characters, understanding their significance, and dismissing the “trifles” that please only the uneducated and effeminate. So it would be best that Spenser listen to his Muses. If they embody the descriptions of Conti, they will reward virtue. They will keep reader and poet alike from one of the most dangerous of crimes in The Faerie Queene – idleness. These divine figures bestow on Spenser’s poem an authority both literary and spiritual. When he invokes the Muses, he joins the tradition of Hesiod, Homer, and Virgil, all of whom lend merit to his poetic project. The opening to Book VI of The Faerie Queene speaks to the eternal truths of the Muses: Ye sacred imps, that on Parnasso dwell, And there the keeping haue of learning threasures, Which doe all wordly riches farre excel, Into the minds of mortall men doe well, And goodly fury into them infuse; Guide ye my footing, and conduct me well In these strange waies, where neuer foote did vse, Ne none can find, but who was taught them by the Muse.9 The “imps,” the Muses of classical poetry, adhere to their roles of wisdom’s protectors by keeping “learning threasures” from worldly corruptions. The “minds of mortall men” alone cannot access such knowledge; they depend upon the guidance of Memory’s daughters. Both reader and poet must recognize that virtue comes from their inspiration, from the guidance of both the metrical “foote” and the physical foot that steps forward. Spenser must ask his Muse for that same guidance: Revele to me the sacred noursery Of vertue, which with you doth there remaine, Where it in siluer bowre does hidden ly From view of men, and wicked worlds disdaine. (6.proem.3)

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Accessing the wisdom of virtue means that Spenser needs the Muses. Hearing their songs, he will attempt to convey their knowledge. Implicit, then, is that “mortall men” learn from these feminine figures. As Stella Revard notes, the muses “function as guardians of culture.”10 The gentleman trained in “vertuous discipline” proves himself by acknowledging their gifts. In the first lines of The Faerie Queene, Spenser announces the gendered nature of this relationship: he is the male figure seeking inspiration from the feminine. He opens, Lo I the man, whose Muse whylome did maske, As time her taught, in lowly Shephards weeds, Am now enforst a farre vnfitter taske, For trumpets sterne to change mine Oaten reeds[.] (1.proem.1) The Muses change the poet’s subject matter. Here, the virtuous male poet is granted the subject matter of moral import; that which has been hidden before is now revealed to “the man.” Spenser invokes “O holy virgin chiefe of nyne” to “Lay forth out of thine everlasting scryne / The antique rolles” (1.proem.2). His Muse grants access to the same hidden body of knowledge protected by Conti’s Muses: the wisdom that encourages masculine virtue. At the same time, the poet is made subject to the feminine influence of divinity. Throughout The Faerie Queene, Spenser refers to his other inspiration – Queen Elizabeth. Even in the first invocation, Spenser turns from the “holy virgin chiefe of nyne” to the other virgin, the “Great Ladie of the greatest Isle” (1.proem.4). Spenser begs her to “raise my thoughtes too humble and too vile” (1.proem.4), as if she too were capable of divine motivation. The male poet is therefore thrust into an awkward position. He pursues the masculine virtue of Conti’s mythology, yet at the same time he is subjected to the will of feminine forces. The Muses dictate his subject matter just as the Queen oversees the song. In the sixth book, Spenser describes the knowledge that “was by the Gods with paine / Planted in earth, being deriu’d at furst / From heauenly seedes of bounty soueraine” (6.proem.3). The language is that of gestation. The seeds of “vertue” are planted and cultivated through the care of the nine daughters. It is “with carefull labour nurst, / Till it to ripeness grew, and forth to honour burst” (6.proem.3). Inspiration follows pregnancy. Spenser’s poet watches the mothers bring eventual birth to “vertue,” just as he will bring to birth the moral lessons of

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The Faerie Queene. So does the work remain masculine in its intent? The Muses’ influence suggests not necessarily. They assume control, and one wonders what the busy male mind does when made the recipient of feminine wisdom. In the notes to the first invocation, A.C. Hamilton considers the exact identity of Spenser’s Muse. First up is Clio, the muse of history.11 The oldest sister, Clio makes a fitting figure of inspiration because the poem details Queen Elizabeth’s genealogy in later books, but Hamilton moves on to his favored candidate: Calliope. She oversees heroic song, the very subject matter so compelling to Conti and the obvious subject of Spenser’s fantastical poem. Notably, when Ovid gave the Muses the opportunity to speak in Metamorphoses, he also allowed Calliope to take the stage, with effects far more complex than Conti’s preservation of heroic masculinity.

C a l l io p e ’ s S ong When the Muses appear in the Metamorphoses, the circumstances are complicated, as they so often are in Ovid’s poem. His invocation is brief; indeed, in the opening lines he simply asks the gods (di) to inspire his beginnings. To see the Muses more properly, we follow Minerva to their home on Helicon. Speaking to the “sisters who govern the arts” (“doctas … sorores”), Minerva explains that she came to see “a fountain that started to gush / when the earth was struck by the hoof of the winged horse sprung from Medusa” (“novi fontis nostras pervenit ad aures, / dura Medusaie quem preapetis ungula rupit”).12 Ovid introduces the Muses, then, not as divine speakers showering humanity with songs of heroic men, but as tour guides who respond to another goddess. The Muses seize this opportunity to speak on their own experiences. One tells Minerva first how the Thracian king Pyreneus tried to trap the Muses and then how the daughters of Pierus challenged the gods to a singing contest. These Muses do not strive to elevate humanity; they begin by protecting themselves. In Patricia Johnson’s words, “Ovid’s episode turns toward the singers and their performances, and underscores the social dynamics of poetic production.”13 Those “social dynamics” involve divinity speaking to divinity, with a political agenda in mind. Rather than being divinely sanctioned authorities, Ovid’s Muses here are singers among the many singers we will meet throughout the Metamorphoses, and the meaning of their utterances is just as subject to change.

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In an early exchange, an unnamed Muse summarizes for Minerva the entry of Pierus’s daughters to the singing contest. Neither reader nor Minerva hears this mortal song first-hand; they must settle for the recreation of the Muse. What follows is a synopsis of only thirteen lines. The speaker for the Pierides recited “the war in the sky” but “ascribed to the giants / a glory undue and belittled the deeds of the mighty gods” (“bella canit superum, falsoque in honore Gigantas ponit et extenuat magnoram fact deoum”; 5.319-20). Immediately, the Muse offers her commentary. She presents this human entry to the contest as an arrogant attack on the gods; the daughter of Pierus celebrates the giants while demeaning the Olympians. The Pierides’ defeat in the contest is almost certain, even before the contest truly begins. When it is the Muses’ turn, Calliope speaks for the sisters, and she knows her audience. She tells how the Olympians ultimately defeated the giants and finishes with the story of Proserpina. On the trope of the singing contest, Johnson writes that a usually diverting challenge between pastoral poets “becomes in Ovid’s hands an unfair match between unequal participants, and with a largely predetermined outcome that silences the defeated once and for all.”14 Indeed, the Pierides turn into magpies by the episode’s end, and it seems the human singers never had a chance. The Muses in Conti’s collection speak truths for the protection of men. Ovid’s Muses seem to have no such commitment. In fact, their first divine gift celebrates the Muses’ ability to punish upstart women. Ovid’s daughters of memory, in other words, dispense no advice to virtuous men and deliver no songs of epic masculine triumph. Ovid instead presents multiple female speakers engaged in rhetorical and political battle with one another. Multiple accounts of truth emerge, with diverging responses. Calliope shifts from the gigantomachy to the story of Proserpina, further from the celebration of men to a tale well suited for the female goddess of virginity, Minerva. Leslie Cahoon writes of the episode, “Ovid’s maleness notwithstanding, it is hard to imagine a more fruitful combination of elements for a feminist investigation.”15 When Ovid’s Muses sing, they do so not for the benefit of men. Instead, Calliope speaks to female auditors about experiences of women. When she gets to the subject of Proserpina’s kidnapping, Calliope gives a moving account of an innocent victim of masculine lust. Near a pool surrounded by “well-watered soil” and “a flowery carpet of Tyrian purple” (“tyrios humus umida flores”; 5.390-1), Proserpina was

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“happily plucking bunches of violets or pure white lilies … in girlish excitement” (“aut violas aut candida lilia carpit … puellari studio”; 5.392-3). Her rape is sudden and shocking, reflected in the loss of those same flowers that Calliope had associated with Proserpina’s innocent delight: In panic, Proserpina desperately cried for her mother and friends, more often her mother. Her dress had been torn at the top, and all the flowers she had picked fell out of her loosened tunic, which only served to increase her distress, poor innocent girl! (5.397-400) Dea territa maesto et matrem et comites, sed matrem saepius, ore clamat; et, ut summa vestem laniarat ab ora, conlecti flores tunicis cecidere remissis. tantaque simplicitas puerilibus adfuit annis haec quoque virgineum movit iactura dolorem. (5.396-401) Calliope focuses on the girl’s experience, emphasizing the narrative perspective of the victim rather than the rapist. That Proserpina first cries for her lost flowers only heightens the tragedy – she seems incapable of understanding the crime committed against her. Her complaint to Ceres, mother to Proserpina, reinforces Calliope’s appeal to female audiences. She will sing of the consequences of this crime, of the effects masculine lust wreaks on the family. Calliope amplifies the tragedy by including other voices of protest against Dis’s crime. The river nymph Cyane speaks directly to Dis, “You cannot take Ceres’ daughter without her mother’s permission. / You ought to have asked for her hand, not stolen her” (“non potes invitae Cereris gener esse: roganda / non rapienda fuit” (5.415-16). The language is clear. Calliope delivers the complaint of another divine figure against masculine lust. Dis, of course, does not listen but pursues his prey with outright violence and moves right past Cyane’s outstretched arms. With penetrative force, he drives through the pool protected by Cyane, leaving the river nymph with grief to match that of Proserpina’s. Cyane “brooded in silence and wasted away in her tears to nothing, / dissolving into the water she’d lately ruled as its guardian / spirit” (“gerit tacita lacrimisque absumitur omnis, / et

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quarum fuerat magnum modo numen” (5.427-9). Ovid narrates the metamorphosis with detail, describing how “First to melt were her slightest / features” (“primaque de tota tenuissima quaeque liquescent”; 5.430-1) until “Nothing solid remained” (“restatque nihil, quod ­prendere possis”; 5.436). Cyane cannot be abducted herself, since there remains no part of her physical body. At the same time she is rendered helpless, a formless body who no longer bars anybody from entering her waters. She is simultaneously passive and resistant. In that, Cyane mirrors the other victim of Calliope’s story. The song then turns to Ceres’ frantic quest to recover her daughter. We hear that “Proserpina’s mother anxiously searched for her daughter / over the world, by land and by ocean, but all to no purpose” (“pavidae nequiquam filia matri / omnibus est terries, omni quaesita profundo”; 5.438-9). She looks aimlessly until she finds Cyane, the witness to Proserpina’s kidnapping, but Cyane has been transformed into a pool of water. She is forbidden from speaking, the price paid for opposing Dis: “If the nymh had not been transformed, she’d have told the whole story. But as much as she wanted to tell it, her lips and tongue were gone” (“Ea ni mutate fuisset, / omnia narrasset: sed et os et lingua volenti dicere non aderant”; 4.465-7). Stripped of her speech, Cyane must find a new way to communicate. Coming in the song of a Muse, the predicament is meaningful. The Muses depend upon speech to communicate their songs, whether directly or through a mouthpiece. In this instance, the mouthpeace has been rendered speechless by the penetration of Dis. Cyane instead presents the daughter’s lost sash, evidence that the girl was stolen away. Calliope too punishes human singers, and for some readers, that punitive approach differentiates her from the subversive artists that appear throughout the Metamorphoses.16 But Ovid’s Muses continue to foreground the perspective of women, whether Proserpina, Cyane, or Ceres. Genevieve Lively goes so far as to claim that “we might see in Calliope’s song a feminist perspective, in which the bond between women – and particularly between mothers and daughters – is celebrated, and in which women try to help and protect one another, not least of all through the stories they tell each other.”17 Admittedly, Calliope’s treatment of the Pierides undermines the solidarity Lively announces here, yet the point remains: the Muses allow other women to speak not with a single unified voice, but as a chorus of voices as fractured and temporary as anything else in the Metamorphoses. By doing so, the Muses present a poetics of political purpose and

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instability as much as divine truth. Men looking for definitions of ­masculinity would be advised to search elsewhere. Indeed, Calliope relates a final episode seemingly unconnected to Proserpina. She incorporates the voice of Arethusa, another nymph turned into a watery pool when she fled from male lust. Arethusa was bathing after a day of hunting. The scene is marked by peace and clarity: “I came on a stream which was perfectly still and perfectly silent, / transparent down to the bed (you could count each one of the pebbles)” (“Invenio sine vertice aquas, sine murmure euntes, / perspicuas ad humum, per quas numerabilis alte/calculus omnis erat”; 4.587-9). The river god Alpheus intrudes in Actaeon-like fashion, making clear his violent desires. She ran “as doves will flee from a menacing hawk on the fluttering wings” (“ut fugere accipitrem penna trepidante columbae”; 4.605). Arethusa escapes when she transforms into a pool, melting away from her physical form before the male god can catch her. Or so it seems. The river god Alpheus “reverted to water in order to be united with me” (“ore / vertitur in proprias, ut se mihis misceat, undas”; 4.637-8). She joins Cyane in suffering the effects of masculine lust, and their stories destabilize the order that Calliope would otherwise celebrate. The water runs away and takes the Muses’ rhetorical coherence along. Cahoon concludes her reading of Calliope’s song with a paradox. She writes that “the song offers its own deconstruction.”18 In the frame narrative, Calliope describes how the presumptuous mortals were defeated by superior divinity, yet her tale simultaneously questions authority, gender, and violence. The Muse give voice to the wounded daughters and helpless river nymphs, no matter how powerful Jove and the Olympians become by the conclusion. The song deconstructs itself; the same might be said of The Faerie Queene. Spenser’s Muse inspires the celebration of Christian virtue and Elizabeth’s Protestant reign. In contrast to such revelation, though, persists Spenser’s destabilizing wordplay on “muse,” associated here with lies and multiplicity. In the first canto of Book I, the Redcrosse Knight retires for the night after defeating Errour, and Archimago seizes the opportunity, attacking the knight through dreams of a false Una. Conti insisted that masculine minds remain active and vigilant, but in sleep the Redcrosse Knight almost loses the strength of his “manly heart.” He succumbs to the “ydle dream” (1.1.46) of feminine influence, and the mental effects linger even after he wakes up. Spenser writes that “Long after lay he musing at her mood, / Much grieu’d

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to thinke that gentle Dame so light” (1.1.55). The knight, then, is “musing” in response to fabrication, sexuality, and what he thinks is feminine influence. The poet-narrator of The Faerie Queene subjects himself to the Muses in composing the epic poem; the Redcrosse Knight finds himself subject to another type of muse that destabilizes masculinity and the very notions of truth. The canto ends with troubled sleep, in which “That troublous dreame gan freshly tosse his braine, / With bowres, and beds, and ladies dear delight” (1.1.55). The Redcrosse Knight muses about women, and finds himself threatened with lustful delight. In his invocation, Spenser’s narrator turned to the Muses for divine insight and virtue. At this moment, they are associated with something less trustworthy, and the reliability of their revelations begins to splinter. This punning on the word “muse” reappears throughout the first book. In the next canto, the Redcrosse Knight abandons Una and joins with Duessa, a false version of the faith he intended to protect. Irony undercuts the courtship scenes that follow. “Faire seemely pleasaunce ech to other makes” (1.2.30), Spenser writes with emphasis on the falsity of their lovemaking: Redcrosse is betrayed by “his falsed fancy” (1.2.30), succumbing to “faire seemely” appearances, a suggestion of what the OED deems “insincere, flattering” in its definition of “fair.”19 When he tries to fashion for Duessa a crown of branches, he is stunned to find the tree bleeds and speaks. He has stumbled upon Fradubio, turned into a tree after falling for Duessa’s manipulations. The confrontation once again leaves the knight immobile and emasculated: “Astond he stood … And with that suddein horror could no member moue” (1.2.31). Even when the Redcrosse Knight appears to have recovered, Spenser connects the knight’s confusion to “musing”: At last whenas the dreadfull passion Was ouerpast, and manhood well awake, Yet musing at the straunge occasion, And doubting much his sence, he thus bespake[.] (1.2.32) The knight’s “manhood” depends upon his activity. If he succumbs to “ladies dear delight” when he dreams, he recuperates masculinity when he awakens. At the same time, though, Spenser indicates the fragility of such heroism. The Redcrosse Knight is still “musing” about this very Ovidian image of a speaking tree. Unaware of the irony that

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he has trusted Duessa, he even wonders whether this tree is “guileful spright” that “fraile men doe oftentimes mistake” (1.2.32). Redcrosse cannot comprehend that Duessa has already fractured his masculinity by forcing him to ponder falsehoods, dreams, and figments. And Fradubio, made literally immobile as a tree, succumbed to Duessa. Against manhood and activity, then, Spenser sets musing and idleness. For a poet inspired by the Muses, the associations prove contradictory. They turn The Faerie Queene as a whole into an emasculating dream of the Muse. Similarly, when the Redcrosse Knight enters the House of Pride, he finds himself in a duel with Sansjoy for the hand of Duessa. The night before this battle, the “Chamberlain Slowth” (1.4.43) calls to all the courtiers of the castle, including the two knights. Spenser suggests that even though they do not sleep, they still suffer idleness: The warlike youthes on dayntie couches layd, Did chace away sweet sleepe from sluggish eye, To muse on meanes of hoped victory. (1.4.44) Spenser leaves ambiguous the identity of the “warlike youthes,” but implies that the Redcrosse Knight joins his enemy in sleeplessness. He once again begins to “muse” and once again, his fantasies are misleading and ultimately paralyzing. He misdirects his “warlike” energies and unwittingly sacrifices true faith to deception. In The Faerie Queene, this is what it means to “muse” – to wonder and speculate on fictions to one’s own detriment. Even in the final moments of Book I, the Redcrosse Knight cannot free himself entirely from feminine deceptions. As he celebrates his betrothal to Una, Archimago interrupts with a letter claiming that the knight is already pledged to Fidessa/Duessa. Redcrosse’s reaction implicates the goddesses of poetic inspiration. “The tyding straunge did him abashed make, / That still he sate long time astonished / As in great muse, ne word to creature spake” (1.12.29). The deception leaves Redcrosse helpless. He recovers, and learns to place his faith in Una, yet “musing” remains a dangerous form of idleness. To enact Christian virtue, to recover holiness, one must resist. That would also leave Spenser without a poem. As a suffering male seeking approval from his object of interest, Spenser’s narrator steps into the model of courtly lover and participates

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in the power dynamics of the period’s love poetry. In subordinating himself to Elizabeth I, he also subordinates himself to the Muses. Inactivity follows in the poem’s language, and so Conti’s fear of masculine stagnation becomes a threatening possibility. For Spenser, the Muses emasculate. His invocations thus demonstrate a fundamental ambivalence: they motivate the act of writing poetry while simultaneously implying that poetry is deceptive and stifling. Spenser makes himself idle, subjects himself to musing, and assumes what is otherwise cast as feminine deception. The poem deconstructs both itself, and the identity of the male poet. The original ending to the 1590 edition offers one more fleeting point of resonance. Lauren Silberman has made the case that Spenser critiques the “conventional sexual ideology” of the period.20 Central to her examination is the figure of the Hermaphrodite that concludes the original third book, when Amoret and Scudamore combine into a seeming whole. This Hermaphrodite refutes gender binaries; by implication they refute stable perspectives, stable desires, and stable knowledge. And in his description of Hermaphrodite, Spenser notes that “my teme begins to faint and fayle, / All woxen weary of their iournall toyle” (3.12.47). His poetic inspiration flags, yet still he grants the lovers this moment: “And ye faire Swayns, after your long turmoyle, / Now cease your worke, and at your pleasure play” (3.12.47). A.C. Hamilton explains the resonance.21 In Book VI, Spenser asks the Muse for assistance as the act of composing verse has left the narrator exhausted. He writes, “Now turne againe my teme thou jolly swayne, / Back to the furrow which I lately left” (6.9.1). The “teme” is apparently the Muses on whom the poet depends, yet they are pulled by the “jolly swayne,” a figure implicitly linked to the two lovers in Book III. This speaks to a crucial issue at work in the poem – it necessarily transforms and destabilizes gender by merging deception into revelation. When he invokes Hermaphrodite, Spenser obviously draws upon Ovid’s narrative. He describes the reunion of Scudamore and Amoret as a metamorphosis: But she faire Lady ouercommen quight Of huge affection, did in pleasure melt, And in sweete rauishment pourd out her spright: No word they spake, nor earthly thing they felt, But like two senceless stocks in long embracement dwelt. (3.12.45)

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Amoret may not physically “melt,” but the effect is the same. Her body’s boundaries merge with that of her lover, as if waters mingled. The combination leaves both speechless, an effect common enough in The Faerie Queene, yet in this case suggestive of the Redcrosse Knight’s momentary musing. Spenser continues, “Had ye them seene, ye would haue surely thought, / that they had beene that faire Hermaphrodite” (3.12.46). Male and female combine so completely that observers cannot know for certain what they see. Spenser permits the ambiguity in describing them like “faire Hermaphrodite,” if not literally so. The lovers seem “growne together quite” (3.12.46) in a vision of mutual desire that confuses definitions of activity as much as gender. The characters say and do nothing yet accomplish quite a bit. In the Metamorphoses, Ovid gives the story of Hermaphroditus by detailing the “notorious fountain of Salmacis, / how it is so and why it softens and weakens the men / who bathe in its strength-sapping stream” (“Unde sit infamis quare male fortibus undis / Salmacis enervet tactosque remolliat artus”; 4.285-7). He explains that Hermaphroditus, the son of Mercury and Venus, finds a clear pool “lushly fringed by a circle of fresh and evergreen grass” (“caespite cingunter semperque virentibus herbis”; 4.300-1). This feminine space of natural productivity is home to Salmacis, a nymph who refuses to join in any hunts with her sisters. As soon as Salmacis sees Hermaphroditus, she attempts to seduce the young boy, driving him to protest her embrace. She follows him into the water, “grabbed hold of his limbs as he struggled against her, greedily kissing him, / sliding her hands underneath him to fondle his unresponsive / nipples and wrapping herself round each of his sides in turn” (“pugnantemque tenet luctantiaque oscula carpti / subiectatque manus invitaque pectora tangit, / et nunc hac iuveni, nunc circumfunditur illac”; 4.358-60). The gender dynamics of Calliope’s song are reversed as Salmacis entraps Hermaphroditus and forces him into the position usually occupied by a protesting woman. Ovid follows Salmacis’s grasp to the final transformation: The bodies of boy and girl were merged and melded in one. The two of them showed but a single face. You know, when a twig is grafted on to a tree the stock and branch will join as they grow and mature together; so, when those bodies united at last in that clinging embrace

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they were two no more but of double aspect, which could be fairly described as male or as female. nam mixa duorum corpora iunguntur, faciesque inducitur ilis una, velut, siquiq conducat cortice ramos, crescendo iungi pariterque adolescere cernit. Sic ubi conplexu coierunt membra tenaci, nec duo sunt et forma duplex, nec femina dici nec puer et possit: neutrumque et utrumque videntur. (4.373-9) The episode does not feature the mutual embrace between lovers that we see in Spenser’s poem. It does, however, stress the gender confusion in terms of action and activity. Salmacis assumes the role of rapist and kidnaps Hermaphroditus, rendering him helpless while dismantling the distinction between identities. There is no mutual pleasure, but as Alison Keith writes, “here, if anywhere in Latin narrative, a female character aspires to the role of the (mobile, male) hero of epic.”22 In the waters, narrative, action, and gender are merged into a troubling confusion. Alison Sharrock pursues this point to its final point. She writes, “[T]here is one tale in which the epic force of the ‘Muse’ is triumphant, her will is imposed on the depowered and emasculated poet, and her desire for him is fulfilled.”23 The poet too merges into the Muse, in an image of inspiration as relationship and as multiplicity. Ovid’s Muses extend a variety of feminine perspectives. Spenser will find himself similarly emasculated in the moment of inspiration, despite what the model of Conti would suggest about male rectitude. Inspiration, it seems, means fracturing the boundaries of sex and perspective alike. When Spenser invites readers to envision Hermaphrodite in his 1590 conclusion, he invokes earlier moments in the Metamorphoses. Lauren Silberman shows that Spenser echoes a scene in Book I, when the Redcrosse knight rests beside a clear stream. In his stillness, he succumbs to the false charms of Duessa. Both knight and lady “bathe in pleasaunce” (1.7.4), the knight unaware that these waters are charmed by Diana so that “all that drunke thereof, do faint and feeble grow” (1.7.5). Like the pool of Salmacis in the Metamorphoses, it debilitates those men who enter it. Spenser writes that the Redcrosse

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Knight “Pourd out in loosnesse on the grassy ground” (1.7.7), just as Amoret “pourd out her spright” in a similar figure of helplessness and sexual climax.24 Both instances feature the transformation of gender: Amoret merges with her male lover and for the Redcrosse Knight, his “manly forces [begin] to fayle, / And mightie strong [is] turnd to feeble frayle” (1.7.6). The watery imagery reflects Ovid’s account of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, but those are not the only pools in the Metamorphoses. Calliope also describes the same kind of liquid transformation: the nymphs in her story similarly pour out into streams and rivers, the consequences of sexual desire. The Redcrosse Knight’s enervation, then, connects not only to Hermaphrodite but also to Ovid’s Muses. In fact, as he rests beside the stream “the chearfull birds of sundry kind / Doe chaunt sweet musick, to delight his mind” (1.7.3). Under the spell of artistic pleasantries, the Redcrosse Knight loses his masculinity. He listens to the “sweet musick,” unaware of the effects that come from such idleness. For the case of Spenser’s Muse, the linguistic links introduce significant contradiction and paradox. In Conti’s framework, the Muses are charged with remembering past deeds. They inspire the historical scope of The Faerie Queene, from its mythical tales of faerie knights to the national histories of Elizabeth and Arthur. But the Ovidian effects linger, transforming the supposed truth and moral instructions of the divine song to something deceptive and debilitating. Conti relies on the Muses to defend masculinity; Spenser indicates that female goddesses threaten gender identity in the same moment their songs would seem to protect it. On the Metamorphoses, Barbara Pavlock writes, “Ultimately, the principle of instability affects [Ovid’s] poetics as well as his vision of the universe.”25 Over multiple narratives, gender is rendered just as unstable, and the Muses do not help in their myths of feminine pain and transformation. Spenser works from that tradition just as much as he does Conti’s allegorical tradition. If masculinity is a source of authority and stability in The Faerie Queene, the Ovidian influence will reveal it to be insecure – even from the opening invocations of deceptive feminine goddesses who will turn their male narrator into a watery mess. As in all things Metamorphoses, we discover more often contradiction rather than answers. The Muses deliver more of the same. By the end of Ovid’s career, the inconsistency becomes only more pronounced. In Tristia, Ovid documents his exile from Rome, lamenting the loss

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of career, status, and family. Notably, one divine figure gets a share of the blame for his devastation. Ovid laments, “Amid all the myriads of our people, many as are my writing, I shall be the only one whom my Calliope has injured” (“inter tot populi, tot scriptis, milia nostril, / quem mea Calliope laeserit, unus ero”).26 Listening to this goddess has its consequences – Ovid knows that well. As payment for her gift of artistic inspiration, she invites the poet to destruction, to alienation, to enervation. His relationship to these purveyors of art, finally, remains ambivalent.27 He writes, “Although at times I curse the poems whose injury to me I recall, and my Pierians, yet when I have cursed them well I cannot live without them” (“quamvis interdum, quae me laesisse recordor, / carmine devoveo Pieridasque meas, / cum bene devovi, nequeo tamen esse sine illis”).28 That tragedy remains. His Muses doom him, but he is helpless to resist them. Spenser’s relationship to his Muses may not lead to such desperation, but the same contradiction ultimately fails to resolve. Conti presumes that Muses deter men “from just about any kind of lust.” They comfort “good men,” inspire with songs of martial triumph, and preserve ancient wisdom. Spenser may hope for the same when he invokes his muses. After all, he writes to preserve England’s past, to honour its queen, and to train the young gentlemen of the realm. Yet in the act of musing, lust and idleness emerge as dangerous threats. Spenser’s humanist tradition depends upon myth to defend masculinity; Conti confers upon him that resource. In retelling the events of Classical literature, Spenser preserves their lessons, protecting truth from “women (as a group), and the unlettered crowd.” The same ancient traditions, however, deconstruct that masculinity. Ovid blends genders in Hermaphrodite; that much is clear. His Muses, for all of the punishment they inflict on upstart humans, also introduce problems of perspective, difference, and – not surprisingly – change. Masculine fortitude becomes masculine violence, and Calliope’s women grieve at the imposition, suggesting subversion of the martial values so celebrated by Conti. Ultimately, Spenser leaves his readers with the paradox of his Ovidian influence: his poem protects truth while admitting what Conti fears as feminine dissolution. The reader is left to muse on that gendered confusion. We can choose to struggle with a text of both feminine and masculine method, one that teaches and confusions in equal measure, as if two poems wrapped each other and merged into a single pool of water. And of course, we

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would know that after 1596, Book 3 gives two different endings. In the later version, Scudamore has left, and the reunion is delayed, fracturing the plot and the very structure of the poem itself. A single conclusion would never do.

Not e s   1 John Mulryan and Steven Brown, “Introduction,” in Natale Conti’s Mythologiae, trans. and ed. John Mulryan and Steven Brown, vol. 1 (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2006), xxxviii.  2 Conti, Natale Conti’s Mythologiae, 1. All subsequent references to this work will be cited within the text.   3 Edmund Spenser, “Letter to Raleigh,” in The Faerie Queene, revised 2nd ed., ed. A.C. Hamilton (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2007), 714, 713–18.   4 Philip Hardie, “Spenser and Ovid,” in A Handbook to the Reception of Ovid, ed. John F. Miller and Carole E. Newlands (Chichister and Malden: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 292, 291–305.   5 Ibid., 291.   6 Here, I follow Don Fowler, “Masculinity under Threat?: The Poetics and Politics of Inspiration in Latin Poetry,” in Cultivating the Muse: Struggles for Power and Inspiration in Classical Literature, ed. Efrossini Spentzou and Don Fowler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 141–60. As Fowler shows, questions of gender and the meanings of inspiration long attended to the poetic traditions of the muse.   7 A.M. Keith, Engendering Rome: Women in Latin Epic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 35. Lynn Enterline, in Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), takes a similar approach to the classroom in early modern England. Enterline examines how classical myth conveyed gender norms, and how Shakespeare’s “Venus and Adonis” responded. See especially chapter 3.   8 Conti does mention women who might find use in song or poetry. He gives the example of Clytemnestra in the Odyssey: “By singing the praises of women who had lived chastely and decently while their husbands were away, the poet-singer filled her mind with the desire to seek honor, glory, and moral rectitude. And because he was able to remain on familiar terms with her, she was able to develop the will power she needed to

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ward off evil thoughts” (657). Her downfall comes when her lover Aegisthus kills the poet-singer and so makes Clytemnestra vulnerable. Even in this case, the Muses’s primary function is to protect the husband’s social identity.   9 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, revised 2nd ed., ed. A.C. Hamilton (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2007), 6.proem.2. All subsequent references to this text will be noted with in-text citations. 10 Stella P. Revard, “Muses,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A.C. Hamilton (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 482, 481–2. 11 See note to 1.proem.2 in The Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton. 12 Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. David Raeburn (London: Penguin, 2004), 5. 255-7. All subsequent references to this translation will be noted with in‑text citations. The Latin transcription refers to P. Ovidius Naso, Metamorphoses, Perseus Digital Library, accessed October 2017, www.perseus.tufts.edu, 5.255-57. All subsequent references to this text will be noted with in-text citations. 13 Patricia J. Johnson, Ovid before Exile: Art and Punishment in the Metamorphoses (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), 47. 14 Ibid., 46. 15 Leslie Cahoon, “Calliope’s Song: Shifting Narrators in Ovid, Metamorphoses 5,” Helios 23:1 (1996): 45, 43–66. 16 See for example Barbara Pavlock, The Image of the Poet in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009). Pavlock argues that Calliope “is in an important way an antithesis of Ovid as poet: along with her unnamed sister who dismissively summarizes the Pierides’ story about the Giants’ attempt to overthrow the gods, she is firmly on the side of Olympian authority” (7). 17 Genevieve Lively, Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”: A Reader’s Guide (New York: Continuum, 2011), 68. 18 Ibid., 61. 19 “fair, adj. and n.,” Oxford English Dictionary, www.oed.com, accessed July 2017. 20 Lauren Silberman, Transforming Desire: Erotic Knowledge in Books III and IV of The Faerie Queene (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 2. 21 See note to 3.12.47 in The Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton. 22 Alison Keith, “Versions of Epic Masculinity in Ovid’s Metamorphoses,” in Ovidian Transformations: Essays on the Metamorphoses and Its Reception, ed. Philip Hardie, Alessandro Barchiesi, and Stephen Hinds (Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society, 1999), 218, 214–39.

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23 Alson Sharrock, “An A-musing Tale: Gender, Genre, and Ovid’s Battles with Inspiration in the Metamorphoses,” in Cultivating the Muse, 212, 207–28. 24 On the verbal echoes, see Silberman, Transforming Desire, 54–8. 25 Pavlock, The Image of the Poet, 7. 26 Ovid, Tristia and Ex Ponto, trans. Arthur Leslie Wheeler (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1959), 2.567-8. The original Latin comes from the same volume. 27 On these lines, Johnson writes in Ovid before Exile, “In his exile poems … the Muses are depicted often, and almost exclusively negatively, as the cause of Ovid’s relegation” (73). He “transforms Helicon into a setting unsafe for poets, and the Muses into tyrants of their domain, jealously guarding their prerogatives and silencing those who challenge their ­version of the truth” (73). 28 Ovid, Tristia, 5.7.31-3.

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5 The Birth of Tragedy: Milton, Ovidian Masculinity, and Poliziano’s Orfeo Ian Frederick Moulton

Sometime let gorgeous Tragedy In sceptred pall come sweeping by, Presenting Thebes, or Pelops line, Or the tale of Troy divine. Or what (though rare) of later age, Ennobled hath the buskined stage. But, O sad virgin, that thy power Might raise Musaeus from his bower, Or bid the soul of Orpheus sing Such notes as warbled to the string, Drew iron tears down Pluto’s cheek, And made hell grant what love did seek. John Milton, “Il Penseroso,” 97-1081

In John Milton’s early meditation on melancholy, “Il Penseroso,” he celebrates the genre of tragedy, primarily honouring the ancient Greeks, though admitting that some recent plays do have merit. The figure that Milton chooses to embody the tragic mode is not Oedipus or Orestes (let alone Hamlet), but rather the mythical poet Orpheus. Consciously or not, by choosing Orpheus, Milton recalls the first modern vernacular tragedy, La Fabula d’Orfeo, written by humanist scholar and poet Angelo Poliziano in late fifteenth-century Mantua. Whereas “Il Penseroso” is silent on the topic of Orpheus’s sexuality, Poliziano’s influential staging of the story is centered on the homoeroticism of Orpheus. Inspired by the depiction of Orpheus in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Poliziano placed masculine gender identity and queer sexuality at the roots of early modern tragedy.

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Poliziano’s insistence on Orpheus’s homoeroticism is significant, because in early modern intellectual culture Orpheus was often seen as embodying the transcendent power of poetry and eloquence. His song was said to charm all of nature: even trees would gather to listen to him.2 When his wife Eurydice was killed by a snake, Orpheus had the power to move Pluto himself, convincing the lord of the underworld to free his beloved. Milton’s celebration of the song that “made hell grant what love did seek” does not mention the tragic conclusion of the story: Eurydice is allowed to follow Orpheus back to the land of the living on the condition that he does not turn around to see if she is following him to safety. Of course, he cannot resist the temptation; he looks back, and his wife is torn from him and flung back into hell. The idea of a poet whose art might be strong enough to conquer death was clearly attractive to an ambitious writer like Milton, and Orpheus appears at crucial moments throughout Milton’s work.3 “Il Penseroso”’s companion piece, “L’Allegro,” concludes with an image of Orpheus lying langorously “on a bed / Of heaped Elysian flowers” (147-8), listening rapturously to “soft Lydian airs” (136). In these early poems, Orpheus is idealized and celebrated, but in Milton’s later works, he appears as a tragic failure – a poetic model that Milton, in various ways, seeks to surpass. In Milton’s elegy Lycidas, Orpheus appears primarily as an archetype of the poet whose genius cannot save him from death (58-63). The narrator of Lycidas, clearly a survivor, hopes for better. In Paradise Lost, Milton’s narrator compares his own description of hell to Orpheus’s failed journey to the underworld, claiming to have succeeded “with other notes than to the Orphic lyre” (3.170), implying that inspiration from the Christian God will succeed where classical skill fails. Unlike Orpheus, Milton can go to hell and back without losing what he came for. Milton’s references to Orpheus tend to focus on his journey to the underworld, an achievement that can be figured both as success (he convinces Pluto to give up Eurydice) and failure (he does not succeed in rescuing her). The poet’s song may conquer death; the poet himself is fallible and weak. But Milton also frequently alludes to the savage conclusion to the story of Orpheus. Stunned by the loss of Eurydice, Orpheus swears never to love another woman. This rejection infuriates a crowd of Maenads – female worshippers of Bacchus – and they tear Orpheus to pieces in their rage. Milton alludes to Orpheus’s dismemberment in Lycidas:

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by the rout that made the hideous roar, His gory visage down the stream was sent, Down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore. (61-3). And in Paradise Lost Milton decries the barbarous dissonance Of Bacchus and his revellers, the race Of that wild rout that tore the Thracian bard In Rhodopè, where woods and rocks had ears To rapture, til the savage clamour drowned Both harp and voice; nor could the Muse herself defend Her son. (7.32-8) How are we to read Milton’s choice of Orpheus as the embodiment of “gorgeous Tragedy” in “Il Penseroso”? Orpheus’s status as a tragic figure is obvious, but also complex and overdetermined. Like Adam and Eve, Orpheus predictably does the one thing he has been told not to do. His tragic backward glance is literally “perverse,” a word derived from the Latin “perverto” – “to turn the wrong way.” Eurydice’s initial death is a random accident, a literal mis-step – her foot falls by pure chance on a hidden snake in high grass. But her ultimate imprisonment in the underworld is not a meaningless misfortune; it is the fault of Orpheus’s failure to follow the simple command he has been given: don’t look back. His perversion is to blame. The double loss of Eurydice leads to a second tragedy – Orpheus’s own dismemberment at the hands of the Thracian women. Precisely why do the Bacchantes kill Orpheus? Depends who you ask. In early modern philosophic discourse, Orpheus was often interpreted as the embodiment of culture, order, and reason – an Apollonian poet torn to shreds by Dionysian barbarians. There are echoes of this interpretation in Milton’s account in Paradise Lost – the civilized Muse is defenseless against barbarous dissonance. But that is not how the Bacchantes see it. They say they are killing Orpheus because he refuses to love women. The most familiar and canonical accounts of Orpheus in the early modern period were those in Virgil’s Georgics and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In Virgil, after failing to rescue Eurydice, Orpheus is simply crushed by grief: “No thought of love or wedding song could bend his soul.”4

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The Bacchantes attack and kill him for his singleminded devotion to the memory of Eurydice, “the Ciconian women, resenting such devotion … tore the youth limb from limb.”5 In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, on the other hand, Orpheus reacts to the loss of Eurydice not only by refusing to ever love another woman, but also by explicitly transferring his sexual attentions to adolescent boys: Orpheus had fled completely from the love of women, either because it hadn’t worked for him or else because the pledge that he had given to his Eurydice was permanent; no matter: women burned to have the bard, and many suffered greatly from rejection. Among the Thracians, he originated the practice of transferring the affections to youthful males, plucking the first flower in the brief springtime of their early manhood.6 In Book X of the Metamorphoses, following the loss of Eurydice, Orpheus sings tales of “young boys whom the gods have desired.”7 He tells the stories of Jove and Ganymede and of Apollo and Hyacinthus, before shifting to the topic of “girls seized by forbidden and blameworthy passions”8 – Myrrha’s lust for her own father, Venus’ passion for the mortal Adonis, and Atalanta’s disdain for Hippomenes. The linking story between these tales of gorgeous boys and wicked women is the tale of Pygmalion’s lust for the female statue he has carved. What all these stories have in common is that they represent alternatives to the normative narrative of heterosexual passion in which an aroused male pursues a reluctant female. In the songs of Ovid’s Orpheus, males pursue boys or objects of their own creation, and females take the sexual initiative, pursuing forbidden partners like Myrrha or, like Atalanta, refusing to submit to masculine desire. In the Metamorphoses, one might argue, Orpheus becomes a poet of queer desire – relating its tragedies (Apollo and Hyacinthus; Myrrha and her father; Venus and Adonis) as well as its triumphs (Jove and Ganymede; Pygmalion and Galathea). But then, Orpheus is seized by the Bacchantes, “a raving mob of Thracian women / with the pelts of wild beasts draped across their breasts.” They attack him because he is the “one who scorns us.”9

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They tear him to pieces for refusing to take the normative role of an aroused male seeking female partners – the role memorably established by Apollo, god of poetry, in his attempted rape of Daphne at the opening of the Metamorphoses.10 Daphne is saved by being transformed into a laurel tree, a tree that then becomes sacred to Apollo and an emblem of poetic glory. Apollo’s pursuit of Daphne thus becomes the pursuit of poetry – as Petrarch recognized in naming his emblematic beloved “Laura,” or laurel. Orpheus’s rejection of women as objects of desire is also a rejection of the normative conception of the masculine poet embodied by Apollo: a lustful male who transfers his heterosexual ardor into devotion to the laurel tree that symbolizes poetic achievement. Though Orpheus remains an Apollonian poet – celebrating harmony and order, playing a lyre, not a pipe – he redefines the sexual energy underlying Apollonian poetry. He rejects the model of sexual desire suggested by the myth of Apollo and Daphne for something more closely approximating Apollo’s tragic love for the young man Hyacinthus. Thus, through his transfer of affection from women to boys, Orpheus redefines orderly, harmonious, Apollonian sexual desire as homoerotic. The Bacchantes kill him for it. Is this the birth of Tragedy? In all his references to Orpheus’s death and dismemberment, Milton never openly addresses the notion that Orpheus was dismembered for choosing boys over women. The closest Milton comes to acknowledging the homoerotics of the Orpheus myth is his description of Orpheus in “L’Allegro” rapturously lying in a flowery bower entranced by “Lydian airs,” a mode of music that Plato famously criticized for being effeminizing.11 Although this description of Orpheus matches later caricatures of the effeminate male homosexual, effeminacy and homoeroticism did not always go together in early modern culture.12 In any case, in Ovid’s account Orpheus clearly sees himself taking the “active” penetrative role in his relations with boys, rather than the “passive” or “effeminate” one. If Milton is gesturing towards Orpheus’s homoeroticism in “Il Penseroso,” the reference is somewhat imprecise. Despite Milton’s silence on the issue, homoeroticism remains central to Orpheus’s status as the embodiment of tragedy, and not just because both Orpheus’s tragedies – his loss of Eurydice and his ­subsequent dismemberment – can reasonably be joined under the category of the “perverse.” In fact, one could argue that early modern tragedy begins with the queer figure of Orpheus – specifically with the ­fifteenth-century humanist Angelo Poliziano’s brief play, La Fabula

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di Orfeo (c1480), the first drama in a modern vernacular language to stage a tragic story from classical mythology.13 This is not likely an argument that Milton would have made. Though his reading was both broad and deep, there is no evidence that Milton was familiar with Orfeo or any of Poliziano’s Italian writings. It has been suggested that Milton may have drawn on some of Poliziano’s Latin poetry in writing his own Latin verse, but it is safe to say that he did not engage intensely with Poliziano either as a poet or a scholar.14 In choosing Orpheus as the embodiment of the tragic poet, Milton may have been unaware he was echoing Poliziano, but that echo remains symbolically and culturally significant. Angelo Poliziano’s Orfeo is an originary text for early modern theater, crucial to the development of drama in Italy and beyond.15 Although Orfeo’s literary and historical importance has long been recognised, relatively little attention has been paid to the homoerotics of its text and the ways it defines its masculine hero.16 Poliziano’s staging of the story is explicitly centered on the homoeroticism of Orpheus, and although Orfeo is a text that promiscuously mixes genres, it clearly figures Orpheus’s passion for young men as fundamentally tragic.17 For a text that would come to have such historic importance, Poliziano’s Orfeo seems to have been composed in particularly chaotic circumstances. In December of 1479, Poliziano abruptly left the Medici court in Florence, where he had been employed as tutor of Lorenzo the Magnificent’s children. He briefly visited Venice, Padua, and Verona before settling at the court of the Gonzaga in Mantua. The reasons for Poliziano’s departure are unclear. He may have felt slighted that he had not been asked to accompany Lorenzo on an important diplomatic mission to Naples. The political situation in Florence was tense, and with Lorenzo absent, Poliziano may have feared for his life. He had also quarreled with Lorenzo’s wife Clarice over his instruction of her children. The reasons for their quarrel are unclear; ostensibly, Clarice objected to Poliziano’s insistence on teaching the boys classical Latin and Greek rather than the Church Latin of the Psalter, but there may have been more to it than that.18 In any case, Poliziano soon regretted his hasty departure from Florence. In March 1480 he wrote an apologetic letter to Lorenzo, asking to be allowed to return. Lorenzo initially resisted, but by May of 1480 Poliziano had been appointed as Professor of Poetry and Oratory at the Florentine Studio, and he was soon back at the Medici court – though no longer as the children’s tutor.19

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While there is some uncertainty about the genesis of Poliziano’s Orfeo, it seems likely that the text was a product of his brief stay in Mantua. The precise occasion for the work is unclear – it may have been written for the celebration of Carnival in February 1480 or for performance at a court wedding in June of the same year.20 In a prefatory letter to Carlo Canale, a courtier to the Gonzaga, published with the text of the drama, Poliziano claims that his text deserves to be torn to shreds (just as Orpheus himself was) because it was written “over a period of two days during continual tumult.”21 He goes on to say that the drama was written at the specific request of Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga, and that he chose to write in Italian rather than in Latin so that more people would understand the play. Poliziano’s choice to write in Italian was enormously significant: Orfeo is generally thought to be the first example of secular vernacular drama in Renaissance Europe. Its form is modelled on the sacra rappresentazione, religious dramas in the vernacular that evolved from medieval mystery plays in the fifteenth century. But Poliziano’s drama is based entirely on Greek mythology and classical forms such as the pastoral eclogue.22 Its content, involving sexual passion, a journey to the underworld, a defense of male homoeroticism, dismemberment, and Bacchic orgies, has little to do with Christian theology or morality. With some pastoral additions, Poliziano’s brief drama retells the story of Orpheus and Eurydice as he found it in Ovid and Virgil. After an introductory speech by the god Mercury, there is a brief pastoral interlude in which an old shepherd named Mosco warns a young shepherd named Aristeo about the dangers of falling in love. Aristeo has been smitten by the sight of a beautiful young woman wandering the fields gathering flowers – Eurydice, the wife of Orpheus. Aristeo pursues Eurydice and, fleeing from him, she is bitten by a poisonous snake and dies. Orpheus laments her death, and resolves to journey to the underworld to rescue her. Pluto is moved by the beauty of Orpheus’s song, and at the urging of his consort Proserpina, he grants that Orpheus may take Eurydice back with him to the land of the living as long as he does not look backward at her as they walk out. But Orpheus cannot resist glancing back at Eurydice, and she is swept back to the underworld, leaving Orpheus alone. He laments her loss, saying that any man who loves a woman as he loved Eurydice is a fool, and that henceforth, following the model of Zeus and Ganymede, he will only have relations with boys. At this, a mob of female worshippers of Bacchus appears and tears Orpheus limb from limb to

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punish his misogynistic rejection of women. The play ends with an orgiastic hymn to Bacchus, sung by the women. Perhaps the greatest classical philologist of his time, Poliziano was intimately familiar with Ovid and Virgil’s treatments of the Orpheus myth. While his Orfeo echoes both sources, it follows Ovid in its treatment of Orpheus’s fate after his loss of Eurydice. Like Ovid’s account, Poliziano’s Orfeo is centered on Orpheus’s homoeroticism. Poliziano insists that Orpheus is murdered because after Eurydice’s death, he chooses to have sex only with boys. Poliziano locates male homoerotic desire at the center of a powerful nexus of love, poetic eloquence, violence, and death. He thus redefines early modern masculinity as queer, courageous, eloquent, suffering, and doomed – a figuration that draws powerfully on Ovid. The significance of Poliziano’s choice to follow Ovid’s model was long muted for English readers by a series of translations that blurred or even contradicted the passages of Orfeo which defend male homoeroticism. In its original, the key passage reads as follows: Da qui innanzi vo’ côr e fior novelli, la primavera del sesso migliore, quando son tutti leggiadretti e snelli: quest’è più dolce e più soave amore. Non sie chi mai di donna mi favelli, po’che mort’è colei ch’ebbe’l mio core; chi vuol commerzio aver co’mie sermoni di feminile amor non mi ragioni (269-76) Which in a straightforward English translation would be: Henceforth I want to gather new flowers The springtime of the better sex When they are all elegant and slender This is a sweeter and more gentle love. Let none ever speak to me of women, Since the one is dead who had my heart; Anyone who wants to engage with my speech Should not talk to me of female love.23

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The male gender of Orpheus’s new lovers is clear not only because of the chauvinist term “sesso migliore / better sex,” but also because of the masculine gender of the phrase “tutti leggiadretti e snelli / all elegant and slender.” In any case, the passage is clearly an echo of Ovid’s account of Orpheus, quoted earlier, “transferring [his] affections to youthful males, plucking the first flower / in the brief springtime of their early manhood.” That this passage had resonance for Poliziano is attested by a marginal annotation in his hand in a 1477 edition of the Metamorphoses in the Bodleian Library that explicitly notes that Orpheus introduced the practice of loving boys to Thrace.24 Harry Morgan Ayres’s English translation of Orfeo, published in 1929, clouds Orpheus’s categorical and specific choice of males over females in a haze of poetic euphemism.25 Henceforward other flowers charm mine eye, Still other springs their blooms for me unfold, Where lusty youths in merry revelry Do nothing of the sweets of love withold. Of women let none speak when I am by, For she is dead who had my heart in hold. Of women let none speak, in short and plain, Who me in speech would henceforth entertain. Louis E. Lord’s 1931 Oxford University Press translation simply changes the males to females by calling them “maidens in their spring”: Henceforth I would cull new flowers, maidens in their spring when all are fair and lithe. This is a love more gentle and more sweet. Let the love of women bind me no longer. Let there be no longer any to prate to me of women. For dead is she who held my heart. Who would converse with me let him not talk to me of women’s love.26 Not only have the youths changed their gender, the subjective genitive “women’s love” in the final line makes it seem that Orpheus is rejecting “women’s love” for him, rather than the objective genitive “love of women” – that is, men’s love for women – suggested by the original Italian. In any case, it obviously makes no sense for Orpheus to praise

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younger women as lovers in the context of his rejection of all women following the death of Eurydice. Having declared his love for boys over women, Orpheus attacks women for their alleged inconstancy, and reaffirms his sexual choice with a list of male gods and heroes who loved boys: How miserable is the man who changes his mind for a woman, or ever is joyful or sad for her, or who gives up his freedom for her or believes her looks, her words! She is always lighter than a leaf in the wind and changes her mind a thousand times a day; she follows those who flee her, hides from those who want her, she comes and goes like waves on the shore. Put your whole faith in that Jove who, bound by the sweet knot of love takes joy in heaven with his beautiful Ganymede; and Phoebus on earth takes joy with Hyacinth; Hercules surrendered to this holy love, he conquered the world, and was conquered by beautiful Hylas: I urge all husbands to get divorced, everyone should flee the company of women.27 Orpheus’s hostility to women here goes beyond anything expressed in the Metamorphoses. In Ovid, after all, the shade of Orpheus is reunited with Eurydice in the underworld after his death (11.61-7). Poliziano’s Orpheus, on the other hand, runs through a series of misogynist clichés, and then defends his choice of boys over women by citing the powerful classical precedents of Jove, Apollo, and Hercules, who all took male lovers. He concludes with a call for universal divorce and an end to heterosexual coupling altogether. Cue the raving Maenads. The figure of Orpheus was much praised by Florentine Neoplatonists, including Marsilio Ficino. Neoplatonists tended to interpret the myth allegorically, seeing Orpheus as a symbol of civilized eloquence, potentially powerful enough to conquer death, but vulnerable to the mob of the unlearned.28 In this context, Orpheus’s rejection of women could easily be understood as a celebration of an idealized masculine community of learned humanists, but also as a choice of the life of

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the mind and spirit over the life of the body and its passions. Poliziano was not a Neoplatonist; for most of his career he saw himself as a philologist rather than a philosopher, and while he respected Ficino and his circle, he was not particularly close to them.29 In any case, as Ida Maïer and others have argued, the Orpheus presented in Poliziano’s play is not the heavily allegorized Orpheus of Neoplatonic lore.30 So what does Poliziano’s Orpheus represent, and how are we to understand the double tragedy of his failure to rescue Eurydice and his death by dismemberment? This question is difficult to answer, in part because the original context for the play is unclear. As an aristocratic entertainment written for a specific occasion, the play would certainly have been integrated into the larger and more complex structure of the overall festivities.31 Orfeo was clearly written in haste and at the request of Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga. But was it meant to celebrate Carnival, or was it part of a wedding celebration? If it was written as part of the entertainment for an aristocratic wedding, Orpheus’s initial devotion to Eurydice as well as his ultimate punishment for rejecting women as appropriate sexual partners would both fit well with a wedding’s celebration of normative, structured, and hierarchical heterosexuality. Orpheus’s devotion to his wife would be commendable; his embrace of an all-male community and rejection of marriage would be worthy of punishment. If Orfeo was written to celebrate Carnival, on the other hand, the most significant part of the play might be the Bacchic song that so powerfully concludes it. This song, sung entirely by women, celebrates intoxication, irrationality, and loss of control – and while its ostensible subject is the joy of drinking, it is infused from start to finish with sexual innuendo.32 Both these interpretations would suggest that Orpheus was justly punished – either for choosing boys over women (and encouraging divorce), or for standing in opposition to the orgiastic pleasures of the Bacchantes. In the first reading, he would be punished for disorderly sexuality, in the second, for representing the restraint and civilized order which is opposed by carnivalesque disorder. If one combines both readings, the pursuit of an exclusively masculine community of sexual pleasures aligns itself with order and civilization: in this context, the Apollonian poet is necessarily homosexual. Civilized masculine order is opposed (and ultimately destroyed by) barbaric feminine chaos. What makes Orfeo fundamentally tragic is that there is much reason to suspect that Poliziano’s sympathies lie with queer doomed Orpheus,

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not with the Bacchantes. Reading the play in this way suggests that, when commanded by Cardinal Gonzago to provide a courtly entertainment, Poliziano wrote against the grain, producing a text that can be read as celebrating both marriage and carnivalesque abandon, but actually sympathizing with the tragic figure who is steadfastly opposed both to marriage and the feminine. Poliziano’s sympathy for Orpheus can be deduced from several sources, both in the play itself and more broadly in his life and work. As we have seen, in the prefatory letter to Carlo Canale Poliziano identifies his play (and therefore himself) as Orpheus – worthy to be torn to bits. Thomas M. Greene relates the dismemberment of Orpheus to Poliziano’s philological quest for the perfect, unified text. Over time, precious texts like Ovid’s are destroyed in transmission – the goal of the humanist scholar is to reassemble those texts as originally written from the dismemberment that is the fate of all texts subjected to the errors, omissions, and excisions of time.33 Greene also suggests that Orpheus’s dismemberment has a particular relevance to Poliziano because it echoes the violence of the Pazzi conspiracy against the Medici.34 On 26 April 1478, just two years before Orfeo was written, Poliziano’s patron Lorenzo de’ Medici and his brother Giuliano were attacked during mass in the Florentine Duomo. Giuliano was stabbed to death; Lorenzo was seriously wounded, and only survived because Poliziano and others locked him in the sacristy. The conspirators, including Jacopo de’ Pazzi, the head of the family who sponsored the assassination attempt, were captured and executed. Jacopo’s remains were buried in the church of Santa Croce, but then were exhumed by an angry mob; his body was dragged through the streets of Florence; children mockingly used his head to knock on the door of his house before throwing his remains in the river. Poliziano subsequently wrote an account of the conspiracy in which he provides graphic details of the many atrocities suffered both by the Medici and their opponents.35 For Poliziano, dismemberment was not just an abstraction or a symbol – it was also a realistic consequence of political and social violence. As Michael Rocke has demonstrated, sex between men was a fundamental fact of Florentine culture in the fifteenth century.36 There is certainly evidence to suggest that Poliziano’s own sexual life involved relationships with adolescent males. Indeed, as Alan Stewart has demonstrated, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Poliziano was appropriated by gay literary critics as a precursor or kindred

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spirit.37 Though Poliziano wrote many conventional love poems about women in both Italian and Latin, he openly celebrated homoerotic desire in several of his Greek epigrams.38 Given that a reading knowledge of Greek was relatively rare even among educated Italians in the fifteenth century, these texts would have had a limited readership. They were first published in Venice in 1498, four years after Poliziano’s death;39 a Paris edition of 1519 added Latin translations.40 Here is Epigram 26, entitled, “A Love Poem on Chrysokomos [Goldenhair]”: Look down on me from heaven holding my boy in my arms Jupiter, and do not be envious. And I will envy no-one. Be content with Ganymede, Jupiter. Leave me my boy Goldenhair who is sweeter than honey. I am three and four times blessed! For I have kissed And again I kiss your mouth, O elegant child. Your mouth, your hair, your smile, the light in your eyes! O gods! Certainly I have you, beloved boy, truly I have you! Truly I have you, my beloved! How much I have borne, How much I have suffered, how much I have done to have this prize! O my soul, what now troubles you? What troubled you before? There is no more danger, no more need for my heart to tremble. Indeed the one who fought me and who terrified me is captive and held tight in my arms. Take this dove, goddess, here on your altar, O Venus, give me this lasting joy. You too, go ahead, so that you can inspire a softer love in me Entwine your tongue with mine, my boy.41 Chrysokomos is also the subject of three of Poliziano’s Latin epigrams, one of which alludes to Alexis’s homoerotic love for Corydon in Virgil’s Second Eclogue. Printed editions of the Latin epigrams changed the gender of the beloved from male to female.42 Poliziano also included several anecdotes dealing both with sex between men in his Detti Piacevoli, [Pleasant Sayings], an Italian volume collecting over 400 brief humorous anecdotes, many attributed to or dealing with actual people in Florence.43 Poliziano began compiling these in the summer of 1477, and they circulated in manuscript

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during his lifetime. They were first published in Florence in 1548, over fifty years after his death.44 The tone of the anecdotes is comic and straight-forward. Sexual relations between men are presented simply as facts of life. They are not celebrated or condemned. They are seen simply as something people do, a common feature of physical existence like eating or defecating or sexual relations between men and women: Piovano Arlotto was sleeping in a galley with several young men, and was caressing the basket of one of them. “Hey, Piovano, what are you doing?!” And he answered, “Sorry, I thought it was mine!”45 Nofri, having been arrested for a “sixty-six,” defended himself by saying, “I don’t know anything about that, I was just sodomizing and minding my own business!”46 Giovansimone says that the art of feeling up is a bad one, because the student profits more than the teacher.47 A friar used to come to Orsanmichele looking for a certain priest. One of the priests there said to him, “Friar, aren’t you ashamed to go behind someone who is greater than you?” And the Prior of Lucardo, who happened to be present, said that a vine was good when it followed the pole.48 He’s a man who likes playing with children. That is, a sodomite.49 Despite the bemused tone of Poliziano’s Detti, sexual relations between men in fifteenth century Florence were generally seen as sinful; although they could be tacitly accepted, they were nonetheless the subject of systematic persecution.50 Throughout Poliziano’s life, sodomitical activities in Florence were subject to prosecution by the Office of the Night (Ufficiali di notte), a judicial magistracy whose sole function was to pursue accusations of sex between men. Official records suggest that approximately one percent of the population of Florence was implicated annually in cases brought before the Office.51 It is unclear whether Poliziano’s sexual activities played any role in his quarrel with Lorenzo’s wife Clarice. But towards the end of his

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life, Poliziano’s alleged relationships with young men began to get him into trouble. In 1492, when Poliziano’s patron Lorenzo the Magnificent was on his deathbed, a boy named Duccio “Mancino” was arrested and interrogated by the Eight of the Watch about his homosexual encounters; he identified Poliziano as one of several men with whom he had had sexual relations.52 In 1496, Giovanni di Bernardo Bellacci, a seventeen-year-old boy, testified that he had been sodomized by Poliziano in 1494.53 Poliziano’s sudden death in 1494 at the age of forty was blamed by many of his contemporaries on his passion for boys.54 Over the years, up to nineteen separate accounts of Poliziano’s death circulated, many of them suggesting that he had died of lovesickness for a young man. Recent forensic examination of Poliziano’s remains indicate that the actual cause of his death was arsenic poisoning.55 It is unclear whether he was murdered or committed suicide. Given the turmoil in Florence following the death of Lorenzo di Medici in 1492, either is possible. Poliziano had many enemies, and may have alienated himself from Lorenzo’s successor, Piero de’ Medici, who fell from power just as Poliziano was dying. Poliziano’s close friend, the young philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola died at the same time. His remains also show traces of arsenic poisoning. The reports of homosexual activity that surfaced in Poliziano’s last years and the rumours that proliferated following his death paradoxically assured that the homoerotic aspects of his writing would be hidden or downplayed in the scholarly record.56 While speculation about his supposedly shameful death ran rampant, academic discussion of Poliziano’s works tended to avoid any suggestion that homoeroticism was a serious part of his achievement.57 Like Orpheus’s song, Poliziano’s writings were presented as pure products of his remarkable intellect. In scholarly debate, Poliziano’s queer life and scandalous death were often passed over in silence, just as Milton makes no mention of Orpheus’s dismemberment in his celebration of tragedy in “Il Penseroso.”

Not e s   1 All references to the shorter poems of Milton are to John Milton, Complete Shorter Poems, 2nd ed., ed. John Carey (New York: Longman, 1997).

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 2 Ovid, Metamophoses, X.86-105. All references to the Metamorphoses give book and line numbers from the Oxford Latin text, Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. R.J. Tarrant (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).   3 Rachel Falconer, Orpheus Dis(re)membered: Milton and the Myth of the Poet-Hero (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996); Clifford Davidson, “The Young Milton, Orpheus, and Poetry,” English Studies, 59.1 (1978): 27–34.   4 “nulla Venus, non ulli animum flexere hymnaei,” Virgil, Georgics, 4.516. All references to the Georgics are to Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid: Books 1-6, ed. and trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. by G.P. Goold (Cambridge, M A: Harvard University Press, 1999).   5 “spretae Ciconum quo munere matres … discerptum latos iuvenem,” Virgil, Georgics, 4.520-2.   6 omnemque refugerat Orpheus femineam Venerem, seu quod male cesserat ille, sive fidem dederat. multas tamen ardor habebat iungere se vati; multae doluere repulsae. ille etiam Thracum populis fuit auctor amorem in teneros transferre mares citraque iuventam aetatis breve ver et primos capere flores. Metamorphoses, X.79-85. All English translations of the Metamorphoses are from Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Charles Martin (New York: Norton, 2004).   7 “puerosque canamus / dilictos superis,” Ovid, Metamorphoses, X.152-3.   8 “inconcessisque puellas / ignibus attonitas meruisse libidine poenam,” Ovid, Metamorphoses, X.153-4.   9 “nurus Ciconum tectae lymphata ferinis/pectora velleribus … hic est nostri contemptor,” Ovid, Metamorphoses, XI.3-4, 7. 10 Ovid, Metamorphoses, I.450-567. 11 Plato, Republic, 398e-9. All references to the works of Plato are to Plato, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, N J: Princeton University Press, 1961). 12 Ian Frederick Moulton, Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 70–9. 13 Paolo Orvieto, Poliziano e l’ambiente mediceo (Roma: Salerno, 2009), 312–23, echoes Antonia Tissoni Benevenuti in her edition of the play, L’Orfeo del Poliziano, con il testo critico dell’originale e delle successive forme teatrali (Padova: Antenore, 1986), 89–90, arguing that Orfeo is not a tragedy, but a satyr play. I do not find the argument compelling. For one thing, there are no ithyphallic satyrs in Orfeo, and the tone of the play is

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far from satirical overall. A comparison to the one surviving ancient Greek satyr play, Euripedes’ Cyclops, reveals more differences than similarities. 14 On possible echoes of Poliziano in Milton’s Latin poetry see Estelle Haan, “Milton among the Neo-Latinists: Three Notes on Mansus,” Notes and Queries 44.2 (June 1997): 172, 172–6, and “Milton and Two Italian Humanists: Some Hitherto Unnoticed Neo-Latin Echoes in ‘In Obitum Procancellarii Medici’ and ‘In Obitum Praesulis Eliensis,’” Notes and Queries 44.2 (June 1997): 176, 176–81. But Mario di Cesare, ed., Milton in Italy: Contexts, Images, Contradictions (Binghampton, NY : Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1991) makes no mention of Poliziano in any of its thirty-two articles on Milton’s engagement with Italy, Italian writers, and Italian culture. Poliziano is also absent from the 715-page The Oxford Handbook of Milton, ed. Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 15 Ida Maïer, Ange Politien: La formation d’un poète humaniste (1469-80), Genève: Librairie Droz, 1966), 413. 16 The openly homoerotic element in Poliziano’s life and work was largely marginalized or ignored in most scholarship prior to James Saslow, Ganymede in the Renaissance: Homosexuality in Art and Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 29–32, 121–2, which deals with Poliziano only in passing. 17 On the genre of Orfeo, see Maïer, Ange Politien, 396–405. Criticism of the play has tended to downplay the tragic significance of Orpheus’s defense of male homoeroticism. 18 Alan Stewart argues convincingly that the conflict between Poliziano and Clarice represents a struggle between male, humanist expertise and female aristocratic privilege and familial ties; see Alan Stewart, Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 1997), 19–37. 19 On Poliziano’s flight from the Medici court, see Angelo Poliziano, Poliziano: Stanze, Orfeo, Rime, ed. Davide Puccini (Milano: Garzanti, 1992), XV-XVII. 20 On the debates over the dating and occasion of the composition of Orfeo, see Orvieto, Poliziano, 312–14, and also Poliziano, Poliziano: Stanze, Orfeo, Rime, LI-LIV. 21 “in tempo di dua giorni, in tra continuo tumulti”: Poliziano, Poliziano: Stanze, Orfeo, Rime, 145–6. Unless otherwise indicated, all references to the text of Orfeo are to this edition. All translations of Poliziano are my own, unless otherwise indicated. 22 Maïer, Ange Politien, 393–4.

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23 My translation. James Saslow translated these verses accurately and elegantly in his study Ganymede, 122, but no accurate English translation of the entire play has yet been published. 24 Poliziano’s marginal note reads, “Pueros amandi auctorem Thracibus Orpheum fuisse.” Mario Martelli, Angelo Poliziano: Storia e metastoria (Lecce: Conte, 1995), 98. 25 Harry Morgan Ayers, “A Translation of Poliziano’s Orfeo,” Romantic Review 20 (1 January 1929), 22, 13–24. 26 Louis E. Lord, A Translation of the Orpheus of Angelo Politan and the Aminta of Torquato Tasso (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1931), 98–100. 27 Quant’è misero l’uom che cangia voglia per donna o mai per lei s’allegra o dole, o qual per lei di libertà se spoglia o crede a suo sembianti, a suo parole! Ché sempre è più leggier ch’al vento foglia e mille volte el dì vuole e disvole; segue chi fugge, a chi la vuol s’asconde, e vanne e vien come all riva l’onde Fanne di questo Giove intera fede, che dal dolce amoroso nodo avinto si gode in cielo il suo bel Ganimede; e Febo in terra si godea Iacinto; e questo santo amore Ercole cede che vinse il mondo e dal bello Ila è vinto: conforto e maritati a far divorzio, e ciascun fugga el feminil consorzio. Orfeo, 277-99. My translation. 28 André Chastel, Marsile Ficin et l’art (Genève: Droz, 1954), 175–6. 29 Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 152–3. 30 Maïer, Ange Politien, 394–5. 31 See Bodo Guthmuller, “Di Nuovo sull’Orfeo del Poliziano,” in Poliziano nel suo tempo, ed. Luisa Secchi Tarugi (Firenze: Franco Ceati, 1996), 201–16. 32 On the eroticism of the final scene, see Orvieto, Poliziano, 320–3. 33 Greene, The Light in Troy, 147–70. 34 Ibid., 162–3. 35 Angelo Poliziano, La Congiura de’ Pazzi in Prose volgari inedite e poesie latine e greche edite e inedite, ed. Isidoro del Lungo (New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1976), 87–105.

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36 Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 37 On the importance of Poliziano for John Addington Symonds, see Stewart, Close Readers, 3–8. 38 Especially epigrams 23, 26, and 27. See Saslow, Ganymede, 29–31, 210n32. He translates an excerpt from Epigram 26. Poliziano’s Greek poetry has not been translated into English. Angelo Poliziano, Prose ­volgari inedite, 171–224, gives Latin translations. Angelo Poliziano, Epigrammi greci, ed. and trans. Anthos Ardizzoni (Firenze, “La Nuova Italia,” 1951), provides Italian translations. 39 See Poliziano, Epigrammi greci. 40 Poliziano, Prose volgari inedite, 171. 41 My translation. Ibid.,196–7. 42 Latin Epigrams 62, 63, and 64. Epigram 64 was published with the gender of the beloved changed from male to female. Ibid., 144–5. 43 Rocke, Forbidden Friendships, 317–18n11. 44 On the textual transmission of the Detti piacevoli, see Angelo Poliziano, Detti piacevoli, ed. Tiziano Zanato (Roma: Instituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1983), 27–33. 45 Piovano Arlotto was a Florentine priest (1396-1484), renowned for his jests. Detto 242. Poliziano, Detti piacevoli, 85. 46 Detto 302. Poliziano, Detti piacevoli, 96. “Nofri” refers to Nofri di Giovanni de Michele Parenti, a Florentine diplomat and childhood friend of Piero di Cosimo de’ Medici. “Sixty-six” was a slang term comparable to the more familiar “sixty-nine.” It referred to homosexual activity. Poliziano, Detti piacevoli, 173. 47 Detto 303. Ibid., 96. “Giovansimone” is Giovansimone Tornabuoni, a Florentine merchant. Ibid., 173. 48 Detto 306. Ibid., 96. 49 Detto 408. Ibid., 114. 50 Rocke, Forbidden Friendships, 3–7. 51 Ibid., 4. Four hundred people implicated per year in a city of 40,000 inhabitants. 52 Ibid., 202, 318n22. 53 Ibid., 198, 317–18n11. 54 On the controveries over the death of Poliziano see Stewart, Close Readers, 8–19, Orvieto, Poliziano, 142–55, and also Carlo Dionisotti, “Cosiderazioni sulla morte del Poliziano,” Culture et société en Italie du Moyen-Âge à la Renaissance: hommage à André Rochon, (Paris: Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1985), 145–56.

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55 Orvieto, Poliziano, 142. 56 For example, Martelli, Angelo Poliziano, dismisses Orpheus’s choice to love only boys as psychologically unrealistic (99–100). 57 For example, the thirty-three essays collected in Tarugi, ed., Poliziano nel suo tempo, make almost no mention of any issues relating to Poliziano’s sexuality.

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6 Ovid and Unheroic Masculinity in the Prose Romance of the English Renaissance Goran Stanivukovic

O v id a n d P ro s e Romance In the first book of Ovid’s Amores, his witty and subtly ironic “youthful poem”1 about love, the poet writes of the amorous affair as a military effort: “Every lover is a soldier, and Cupid has a camp of his own … The age that is meet for the wars is also suited to Venus.”2 In a later, didactic poem, The Art of Love, Ovid continues in a similar vein: “Love is a kind of warfare; avant, ye laggards! These banners are not for timid men to guard.”3 These metaphors of combat and heroic deeds with which Ovid imagines the lover’s emotions and the acts of courtship resonate through the Petrarchan love-as-warfare imagery of Renaissance love poetry, but the sentiment they convey also imbues the imagination of classically-educated writers of fiction like Philip Sidney, Thomas Lodge, and Robert Greene, who wrote the prose romances which I explore in this essay. In fictions of affective emotion and heroic adventure experienced by wandering knights or young princes, these writers turn the Ovidian poetics of loveas‑combat into elaborate narratives of courtship. These romances often read as actualizations of the Ovidian conception of love, in the sense that the lover’s heroic acts are juxtaposed with the equally difficult task of persuading the beloved to succumb to his desire. The “violent male desires”4 depicted in Ovid’s poetry herald the intense and sometimes violent male sexuality narrated in prose romances. Although in English prose romance neither the knight nor his beloved

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ever transform into a plant or an animal as the result of a doomed love pursuit, as some of Ovid’s lovers do in the Metamorphoses, the knight’s joint pursuit of heroic glory and amorous victory rehearse the Ovidian poetics of love and combat charged with the conquest of the object pursued. The moralistic commentary that frames these narratives also derives from Ovid: “the didactic system”5 of The Art of Love, for example, is reflected in the authority of the heroes of  romance. Despite Ovid’s influence and popularity in English Renaissance literature, criticism has been slow to assess his role in the making of prose romance in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.6 In her trenchant essay about Ovid’s influence on gender in Elizabethan fiction, Helen Moore argues that “[t]he history of the English reception of Ovid’s Heroides is only just beginning to be written.”7 Moore demonstrates that “the history of Elizabethan fiction is inextricable from that of the familiar letter” as adapted from the Heroides, and she documents the influence of the Ovidian love-letter on the discourses of love and desire in the fictions of Robert Greene, John Lyly, and George Pettie, showing that Ovid was crucial to the new prose fictions on love and male virtue.8 In most other studies of the representation of masculinity in English Renaissance literature, in genres other than prose romance, Virgil, not Ovid, is taken to be the model. Yet the two Roman authors shaped the language and agency of different aspects of masculinity in that literature. Virgil influenced the representation of heroic masculinity, especially in the epic; Ovid became the model for the display of erotic masculinity and men’s amorous expression.9 Prose romance is the ideal genre to show how Ovid’s conflation of militant and amorous masculine agency transforms the Virgilian model of men’s heroic deeds: men’s agency is doubled by being expressed in their roles as both lovers and heroes. The errant knight who is also a lover is thus simultaneously pressured by the two principles that determined the prose romance, owing to the legacy of Ovid and to the hotly debated line between the epic and the romance. Colin Burrow’s ­exploration of the coalescence of epic and romance has deepened readers’ understanding of how narrative and language represent emotion in these two closely related literary forms.10 Ovid’s reputation as one of “the obscene poets”11 of antiquity comes through in his early modern legacy in scenes of sexual violence, rape, soft pornography, and ambiguous, non-procreative, and queer desires. While obscenity and violence furnished prose romance with a negative

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reputation and led to Puritan attacks, such Ovidian transgressions also transformed the chivalric masculinity of the medieval gentry romances into Elizabethan fictions exploring the amorous desires of heroic men. In that period, Ovid’s works were translated concurrent to the shift from heroic to romantic masculinity that took hold in literature. In the 1590s especially, there was “an explosion of Ovidian imitations across a variety of literary genres,”12 and prose fiction was part of this burgeoning trend. Frequent references to Ovid, especially in Robert Greene’s works,13 and the intellectual playfulness with men’s libidinal and emotional agency within fiction, reveal the extent to which prose romance responded to Ovid in the literary representation of masculinity – representation which, as Lorna Hutson has shown, aligned with the correlative social practice.14 Writers of romances that privilege romantic over heroic masculinity sometimes chose as their literary models the very Ovidian texts that appears removed from the subject – man’s amorous agency – they fictionalize. For example, the Heroides is generally considered to be a text about female agency, given its female narrators, and is taken to lie “at the root of the tradition of female complaint.”15 But the Heroides also influenced the affective and introspective language of men in prose romance: the agency that Ovid’s heroic women carve out for themselves in their powerful language of love and desire resonates in the affective, introspective, and emotional language used by men as lovers.

O v id ia n M as culi ni ty The facility with which English writers turned Ovid’s love poetry into new lyrical and dramatic verses of ardent love and eroticism led not just to the imitation of “women with a loss to mourn,” but also the creation of new male voices, searching to satisfy their emotions and fulfil their erotic desires.16 Under Ovid’s influence, the heroic masculine subject became the emotional, unheroic lover of prose romance. In the realm of fiction, prose romance occupied a place alongside early modern educational writing and theory, which, as Jenny C. Mann’s essay in this volume shows, “align[ed] verbal eloquence with approved forms of masculine gentility.”17 Prose romances manifest this alignment through writers’ efforts to offer both pleasure and instruction to male and female readers, to present men as both subject and object of amorous desire, and to display fiction’s stylistic and linguistic

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sensibilities in reimagining the Ovidian language of love in the rhetoric of affective masculinity. In thus re-envisaging Ovid, prose writers adapted his work in the same way as did poets of epyllia and playwrights, who “scanned” Ovidian texts “for their beneficial meaning and then redeployed them.”18 Writers of romances did not, however, redeploy Ovid by taking up a single episode or story: instead, they took a broader approach. Moore points out that “[t]he classicism of most early modern English romance […] is much more likely to be diffuse and allusive than it is to be an act of considered imitation like Sidney’s homage to Heliodorus.”19 Piecing together a picture of Ovidian masculinity in prose romance, therefore, means working with “diffuse and allusive” classical references, yet with an Ovidianism that resonates metaphorically and thematically throughout the large body of prose romance writing. Ovidian masculinity represents a literary counterpart to the materialist view of masculinity shaped by discourses of sex, love, and embodiment in the period. The ideas of gender and sexuality as performative, culturally determined, and historically conditioned categories have underpinned scholarship on masculinity. Linking the humoral theory to the larger notion of masculinity, Bruce R. Smith has observed that “[w]ith respect to masculine identity, the most important implication of the elements/humours/organs system is that masculinity is a function of body chemistry.”20 Such models of masculinity and male desires were also “embedded … in an image of the body whose borders with the world are porous and protean.”21 Yet, to establish a broader literary historical reach about how the period thought of and imagined masculine gender, the materialist, extra-literary narratives require the literary complement of the Ovidianism of prose romance. This burgeoning genre competed for the dominance of the print marketplace with dramatic texts in the age of Shakespeare. Valerie Traub has asked what “an intersectional method – one that attends simultaneously to gender, sexuality, and race” can offer to an understanding of gender in “a historical period prior to modernity.”22 She explores this issue as part of a much larger point that “a general perception that a focus on gender had receded from view” after years of critical inquiry in early modern studies.23 As yet unaddressed in this context, however, is the relationship between masculinity and Ovid; the unheroic masculinity of prose romance has also escaped enquiry. Mapping this literary phenomenon thus means not just taking up the view that Traub identifies as “receding,” but also calls for adding evidence of masculinity

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assessed through the lenses of the intersectional method that she identifies as a new critical possibility.24 Writers of prose romance reshaped the authorial voices and stories of Ovid’s Amores, the Heroides, the Metamorphoses, the Art of Love (Ars amatoria), and the The Remedies for Love (Remedia amoris). The verse narratives of the Amores, which read like men’s deliberations on love, desire, and the body, enabled “erotic plot[s]”25 and sexual language in romances. The Heroides and the Amores offered rhetorical models for men’s romantic self-identification in response to women’s storytelling. It is through the self-reflective language adapted and imitated from the Heroides and the Amores that men in prose romance articulate their emotions, speak circumspectly about the effects of love and desire, and re-imagine heroic agency as amorous self-affirmation. While the Amores gave voice to protagonists’ descriptions of love, Ovidian masculinity in the romances is re-embodied26 as erotically charged, sexually ambiguous, and driven by desire and emotions; at the same time, the didacticism of the Art of Love (Ars amatoria) resonated with the romance writers’ instructions to both male and female readers about how to conduct their love affairs.27 The wide scope of Ovidian masculinity represented in prose romance contrasts with sociocultural roles associating men with sexual power, violence, and political dominance, challenging culturally-supported ideas of male rivalry. The balance, and sometimes tension, in which heroic adventures are punctuated by episodes of intense emotion between lovers reveals the extent to which Ovidianism underpins masculinity in prose romances such as Robert Greene’s Menaphon (1589), Philip Sidney’s Old Arcadia (1593), Robert Parry’s Moderatus (1595), Richard Johnson’s The Seven Champions of Christendom (Part I, 1596; Part II, 7), and Palmerin of England (1612).

T ra n s f o r m at io n o f O v i di an Masculi ni ty In the Old Arcadia, completed in 1580s,28 Sidney follows Ovid: men surrender to the power of sexual desire and are transformed by it. When he re-imagines orations by the Heroides’ women, Sidney transforms the idea that the Heroides is a text in which Ovid expresses sympathy “with and understanding of the female point of view” 29 – he adapts the language of these orations to express male experiences of love. In the Heroides, Ovid also vocalizes the “frustrated effusions of the heroines … separated from the male figures who guarantee

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their well-being,”30 yet Sidney, an adept reader of Ovid, remodels this vocalization to bring the lovers together, making men the initiators of amorous dallying. In Sidney’s swapping of gendered roles is his adaptation of Phaedra’s voice to the gender-fluid scenario in his fiction. Phaedra’s rejection of a man in female disguise – “Away … from me,” she says to Hippolytus, “with your young men arrayed like women! [sint procul a nobis iuvenes ut femina compti!]”31 – is transposed in Sidney’s fiction in Philoclea’s anticipation of Pyrocles’s betrayal: “Is there some third sex left you into which you can transform yourself, to inveigle my simplicity?”32 Cross-dressing becomes a clever device for narrating a cross-gendered voice expressing love for a woman. “[I]f ever my thoughts,” Pyrocles says, did receive so much as a fainting in their true affection; if they have not continually, with more and more ardour, from time to time pursued the possession of your sweetest favour; if ever in that profession they received either spot or falsehood, then let their most horrible plagues fall upon me.33 The disguised Pyrocles resorts to the rhetoric of courtship to court Philoclea. But when Philoclea dismisses his amorous language as “evil matter,”34 intended to manipulate and insult her, Sidney amplifies the Ovidian tone of amorous unrestraint, a shared concern with what Phaedra tells Hippolytus in the Heroides (Her. IV.17-25). Phaedra appears to be tormented by love because of her association with Venus (Her. IV. 55-6); similarly, Sidney’s narrator links Philoclea to Venus. Venus is, in fact, the signifier of unbridled female sexuality, threateningly alluring to men. Sidney imagines Venus as “the babe of wanton nests”35 getting out of her bed, and compares her to “Venus rising from her mother the sea.”36 In the song embedded in the narrative, Sidney adapts Ovidian eroticism – her navel doth unite In curious circle busy sight A dainty seal of virgin wax Where nothing but impression lacks”37 to facilitate seduction. The song interrupts Pyrocles’s attempt at ­courtship and Philoclea’s resistance to it, rushing through courtship to arrive at seduction. Sung by Philisides, the song elaborates the

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theme of sensuousness and emasculates the cross-dressed, heroic Pyrocles. Sidney counts on the newly available translations of Ovid and their expanding circulation to contribute to his readers’ interest in the changing narratives of masculinity that prose romances like his were beginning to promote. To the educated readers of Sidney’s fiction, Ovid conjured up a world of unrestrained eroticism, uninhibited displays of love, and bare flesh, which Philisides echoes when reflecting on his own song: “Yet never shall my song omit / Those thighs (for Ovid’s song more fit).”38 Twice emasculated – first by replacing heroic armour with women’s clothes, and, second by having his sexual appetite revealed in Philisides’s erotic song – Pyrocles’s heroic masculinity is compromised by the poetics of heroic emasculation in prose romances. But this is not where Sidney’s reformulation of Ovidian masculinity stops. When he imagines Pyrocles’s cross-dressing as a sign of “some third sex,” Sidney leaves behind the gender binary and introduces a playful idea of ambiguity that even hints at transgendered embodiment. Ovid was often invoked to question bodies’ shape-shifting abilities, as in the case of witches, as Susan Wiseman explains in her study of transformation as a literary motif from the Metamorphoses in the English Renaissance.39 Yet Sidney’s romance shows that Ovid was also an inspiration for questioning whether the heroic male body could remain unchanged under the weight of sexual desire. Cross-dressing and the idea of a third gender both represent a kind of metamorphosis that transforms the male body. The Old Arcadia laid the foundation for the writing of new romances and for the translation of continental chivalric romances in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

T e s t in g C h iva l r ic Mas culi ni ty As imitations of Sidney’s romance multiplied and new printed romances increased the readership of fiction, new narratives written in response to Ovid pushed the boundaries of fictionalizing masculinity. Continental chivalric fiction offered new directions. Between 1588 and 1616, Palmerin of England, sometimes attributed to Francisco de Morais and Luis Hurtado, was translated by Anthony Munday from French into English. In 1616, the first part of this romance appeared in print in London. Shortly thereafter, it would become the model for other romance fictions of male chivalry, written, published, and republished, in England and on the Continent. Like other Iberian

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chivalric romances, Palmerin of England narrates “deeds” of chivalry that accompany the successes and failures of courtship while presenting “other admirable fortunes” as obstacles intended to test the hero’s chivalric abilities. The story centres on the adventures of two brothers, Palmerin of England (Palmerin d’Angleterre, in the original) and Florian de Desart; along the way, the writer includes tests that scrutinize chivalric masculinity in an un-chivalric age. Prince Primaleon, looking at the pictures that adorn the walls of a room in an ancient mansion, is described as follows: The chamber of his solitarie place, were adorned with many ­pictures, as witnesses of the great misfortunes that had happened to many Louers: as the tragicall motion of Hero and Leander, the sorrowfull end of Piramus and Thisbe, accompanied with the mournful Philomela. Then next her stood the vnhappy queene Dido, hauing the blade of Eneas pierced through her harmelesse heart, the workemanship so cunningly ordred, that you would haue iudged the fresh blood to drop from her faire body. Medea, Progne, Arcana [,] Fedra, & Arife, were all worthily painted, with the whole discourses of their liues. There stood Orpheus wrapped about in the fire of Hell, hauing in his hand his harpe, which in times past could recouer him his wife Euridice. Acteon bare company with these infortunate louers, in the shape of an Hart, and torne a peeces by his owne hounds; by him stood Narcissus, and diuers other, which I omit for breuitie, as [] fearfull to be too tedious.40 This ekphrasis depicts a gallery of abandoned, wounded, raped, and tragically self-possessed young lovers, showing Primaleon that succumbing to intemperate desires leads to the demise of “infortunate louers.” Using classical allusions and allegories for didactic purposes, in typical humanistic fashion, the ekphrasis is a warning that erotic ardour, tragedy, and death are intertwined. Actaeon and Narcissus stand out as the most disturbing examples of the fall.41 The reader of this romance would have interpreted Ovid’s elaborate account of Narcissus’s drowning as a cautionary story of an auto-erotic error of identification: the subject views himself as the “other,” for which he tragically falls. The Ovidianism of the ekphrasis disables rather than enables unions of love as the outcome of desire, subverting the purpose of romance.

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The ekphrasis intimates this in many of its examples. The story of Hero and Leander recalls not only the frequently invoked myth of the doomed lovers separated by the strait at Hellespont, but also the young lover’s masculinity threatened by the looming wreckage of its own agency. Thus the Heroides cautions: “Leander! – to swim – is the sailor’s fear; ‘tis that follows ever on the wreck of ships.”42 The break-up of the ship is also the wreckage of the lover’s life, his sexual unfulfillment displayed against the broader canvas of heroic mastery. The allusion to the story of Aeneas and Dido expands on this topic. The Aeneas of the Palmerin romance hails from the literary tradition in which the Heroides is the conduit for Virgil’s imperial hero to enter the chivalric world of romance, from Ludovico Ariosto to English prose fiction.43 Actaeon shows Primaleon the dismembered male body, a body mutilated not by a heroic opponent but by his own animals, set upon him by the goddess of love, Diana. Orpheus’s misogyny is another severe warning to Primaleon from the pleiade of Ovid’s tragic lovers; Eurydice dies in the underworld, Orpheus turns away from women and starts loving boys, as Ovid tells in Book X of the Metamorphoses. The early modern reader would not have missed the association of Orpheus with homosexuality and, specifically, pederasty.44 In Primaleon, Orphic homosexuality is constituent of the reception of this story in other literary forms. Other motifs amplify the message of the ekphrasis. The image of Procne accompanied by her sister Philomela, raped by Procne’s husband Tereus, draws attention to women as targets of male sexual violence. The topos of dismemberment – in the stories of Philomela and Actaeon – enforces the implication that desire and sexual violence are tragically entwined, and that the male body may be both violator and victim. In the myth of Philomela, the body that was ravished and the tongue that was cut out capture a violent disempowerment of woman as “a sexual being.”45 As for Actaeon, the mutilation of his body erases any possibility of sexual agency. What, then, is the young knight to glean from looking at these pictures of ruined love and sexual violence, and their deathly consequences? What is the reader of this popular romance to make of these disturbing allegories, which depict the crushing effect of uncontrollable sexual desire? In each instance, the author of this ekphrasis shows that the misfortunes of Ovidian lovers are connected to the demise of Ovidian masculinity. This ekphrasis at once pictures desire as a force that shatters masculinity and cautions the young knight-errant whose heroic objective

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and heroic masculinity are threatened by such desire.46 To the early modern reader, such Ovidian scenes of masculine violence and doomed love offered a radically different perspective on romance than those narratives in which effective rhetoric assured successful outcomes to courtship.47 In her book about the transformation of romance in the English Renaissance, Nandini Das observes that for “the young aspiring courtiers of Elizabeth’s court … inculcated [with] the tenets of a humanist education,” romance “offered a language and topos through which their hopes as well as frustrations could be expressed.”48 But traces of the humanist education in chivalric romances that challenge the idea of masculinity are detectable also in fictions written by authors whose connection to humanist education is uncertain. For instance, Richard Johnson, about whom we know only that he was an apprentice in London in the 1580s, wrote a highly popular prose romance in two parts, The Seven Champions of Christendom (printed 1596-7), which epitomizes the idea of heroic masculinity. Yet the heroism of the chivalric quest is kept in check by frequent ironic undertones resulting from episodes in which Ovidian masculinity takes over the narrative. In one of the longest episodes in which an Ovidian text is turned into the subject of romance fiction, the seven Christian champions, Saint George and “his Sonnes,” are gathered together from the countries between the Iberian Peninsula and Ireland, “clad in green vestments like Adonis,” to lament the accidental death of their mother, Sabra. The knights’ “sorrowes wer[e] as great as his [St George’s]” and they wept “a sea of tears vpon their Mother’s grave.”49 Their lament lasts “till from the Earth did spring some mournfull flower, to beare remembrance of her death, as did the Uiolet that sprung from chast Adonis blood, when Venus went to see him slaine.”50 The Adonis simile destabilizes the scene of the sons grieving their dead mother. It actualizes the idea of the mythical god of beauty and desire rhe­ torically re-scripted and embodied in the figures of the Christian champions. One might be tempted to propose that this scene of friendship is also a scene of homosocial bonding, of men brought together as much by their own relationships as by emotion shared for the dead woman. This simile bears other connotations. It would not have escaped the attention of the early modern reader, for example, that the story of Adonis is part of the myth of Orpheus, the god of boys’ love as

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well as of the origin of poetry, mentioned in the Amores III.9 immediately after the reference to Adonis and his mother (“Of what avail to Ismarian Orpheus was his sire, of what avail his mother? Of what that the wild beast stopped in amaze, o’ermastered by his song?”).51 Recollections of the story of Venus and Adonis would also have been unavoidable; narrated in Book X of the Metamorphoses, this is the story of the youthful Adonis running away from the sexually overbearing Venus. The Ovidian myth of Adonis is one in which heteronormative love fails and in which the body of Adonis is the subject of transgressive desire. As Colin Burrow suggests, “[r]eaders of Ovid in the 1590s were acutely sensitive to Ovid’s ability to unsettle our views of bodies and their genders.”52 The tragic story of Adonis resonates through Johnson’s narrative in the form of subtle gender reversals involving the grieving knights. Their heroic masculinity is unsettled through association with the pederastic Orpheus, whose own elegiac song transforms nature just as the power of the sons’ lament, sounding like a curse, is imagined to transform the natural world: “Let neuer Birde sing cheerfully in top of trees, but like the mournfull musicke of the Nightingale, fil all the aire with fatall tunes: let bubling riuers murmure for her losse, & siluer Swans that swim thereon sing doelfull melodie.”53 The audience of Orpheus’s “mournfull musicke” comprises not only the trees and boys moved by its melodies, but also the readers of Johnson’s romance. This narrator moves the reader’s attention from a heroic narrative to homoerotic love and seduction; the adjective “fatall” associates death with homoeroticism, which resonates through this passage. The natural world animated by the force of St George’s lament echoes the transformation in the landscape and animal world moved by Orpheus’s mournful music, but Johnson’s fiction shifts the emphasis from female to male lamentation, effeminizing and eroticizing the heroic male. As a poetic form, classical elegy, as Stephen Guy-Bray has shown, was often adapted to accommodate homoerotic love.54 Johnson’s romance absorbs the style and emotion of elegy and adapts them to the prose of queer Ovidian masculinity. In the Metamorphoses, Adonis is presented as driven by his “manly courage,”55 in control of his hounds, on the hunt for the stag and the boar; shortly afterwards, however, the boar wounds him in the groin. The death of Adonis, which Shakespeare expands into a memorable scene in his 1593 epyllion, Venus and Adonis (1105-16), influenced other Ovidian epyllia reworking the love story of Venus.56 Adonis’s youthful, manly courage is replaced by the unheroic scene of mourning,

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offering a reprieve from the grinding heroic narrative of the knights, who otherwise move from one combat to the next through a suc­ cession of inhospitable lands and deadly challengers. In adapting Ovidian discourse to chivalric fiction, Johnson rewrites masculinity as affectively emotional.

O v id ia n T r a n sves ti s m Ovid’s much-retold stories and myths are deployed in prose romances to fictionalize an Ovidian masculinity that both destabilizes and energizes a multifaceted male agency. Romance – the kind of fiction that promoted love and courtship, as well as a heroic virtue pitted against its penchant for eroticism – found in Ovid both a literary ally and a well of inspiration. In 1590, Thomas Lodge’s Rosalind: Euphues’ Golden Legacy Found After His Death in His Cell at Silexedra appeared in print. This romance is better known as the principal source for Shakespeare’s romantic comedy As You Like It than as an autonomous work of fiction. But Rosalind-Ganymede, the transvestite figure of Shakespeare’s romantic comedy, transgresses forms of embodiment in Lodge’s romance fiction as well. In Rosalind, Lodge makes extensive use of Ovid and draws on his several works, teasing out the nuances of the poet’s gender represen­ tations. In the middle of her argument about the advantages of romantic love over heroic virtue, Aliena quotes Ovid to Saladyne, taking from The Remedies of Love: “Otia si tollas, perier, Cupidinis, arcus, / Contemptaeque iacent et sine luce faces.” (“Take away leisure and Cupid’s bow is broken, and his torch lies extinguished and despised”).57 The way this claim about Cupid’s mastery over the lover’s freedom is set up suggests Lodge’s desire to deliberate with Ovid’s position. Aliena argues: I see Ovid’s axiom is not authentical, for even labor hath her loves and extremity is not pumice stone to race out fancy. Yourself exiled from your wealth, friend, and country by Torismond, sorrows enough to suppress affections, yet amidst the depth of these extremities love will be lord and show his power to be more predominant than fortune.58 In this passage, Lodge rejects Ovid’s rhetoric as artifice because it limits the lover’s agency over the course of courtship. Lodge expands

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on this counter-Ovidian stance by giving men agency in matters of love, as in Aliena’s argument: “[M]en are not men unless they be in love and their honors are measure by their amours, not their labors.”59 The language of individual mastery in love takes on the verbal register of valiant chivalry. Ovid offers a provocation to the language of chivalric romance, and Lodge rewrites the relationship between the agency and language of heroic masculinity. Critics have not explored Ovid’s role in Rosalind, but Lodge is a subtle, flexible, and persistent commentator on Ovid, taking a keen  interest in Ovid’s gendered representations. In The Art of Love, for instance, Ovid contrasts high passion to masculine public achievement: insidious Love glides into defenceless hearts. Where sloth is, that Boy is wont to follow; he hates the busy: give the empty mind some business to occupy it. There are the courts, there are the laws, there are the friends for you to protect: frequent the camps that gleam with the city gown. Or undertake the manly talks of blood-stained Mars: you will soon be routing your pleasures.60 Lodge turns around the Ovidian opposition between a heroic male driven by action and symbolized by Mars, and the loving man, tempted by sloth and symbolized by “the boy” (Cupid): he places a transvestite body at the narrative’s centre. Disguised as Ganymede, Rosalind provides the following argument against Phoebe’s advances: If, Phoebe, I should like thee as the Hyperboreans do their dates, which banquet with them in the morning and throw them away at night, my folly should be great and thy repentance more. Therefore, I will have time to turn my thoughts, and my loves shall grow up as the water cresses – slowly, but with a deep root. Thus, Phoebe, thou mayest see I disdain not though I desire not, remaining indifferent till time and love makes me resolute.61 This passage reveals the romance’s complex subject of embodiment. Do we interpret this passage as though spoken by a woman to a woman, or as if delivered by a woman performing a man and speaking in the language suited to man’s courtship? English Renaissance readers would have been accustomed to cross-dressing and cross-gendering in literature (as well as in folklore), but it would not have escaped

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their attention that this romance employs cross-gendering to rethink the idea of love. Having a young man, Ganymede, play this role, Lodge’s romance displays for the Renaissance reader what has been described as “the boldest resistance to the patriarchal concept of order performed by young men, many of whom espoused potent inversions of normative meanings of manhood.”62 This kind of resistance manifested socially as public unruliness on the part of young men. Yet a literary version of resistance to the patriarchal martial concept of masculinity presents the unruly hero of romances as tempered by the affective language of love and desire.63 It is in this sense that Lodge reimagines Ovidian romantic love to form a contrast to the masculine honour upheld by Augustus and the men of Virgilian epic. Rosalind exemplifies the literary techniques that have led some critics to see Ovid as the romantic counterpart to Virgil and his heroic poetry.64 Lodge transforms Ovidian myth and language into arguments in which the temperance of the male character offers a model of agency in the realm of desire. A masculinity associated with desire is not the anxious masculinity recognized in men’s succumbing to the lure of women, which made “[a]sserting manhood […] a task fraught with difficulty”65; nor does it subscribe to the period’s myth that masculinity formed itself out of the default category of the female gender.66 In Lodge’s romance, as in Shakespeare’s comedy, the ­cross-gendering associated with Ganymede is as much a matter of the ­fiction’s language as it is of the actions depicted in the narrative. That Lodge does not rework the part of Ovid’s tale wherein Jove abducts the handsome Ganymede suggests to the reader that, writing in the spirit of didactic fiction, he is less interested in representing sexual violence than he is in displaying the moral aspect of the story. This selective engagement with Ovid, however, allows the narrative to imagine Ganymede as a signifier of transgressive desire in a different context. When Phoebe describes Ganymede’s body, she catalogues the beauty of the beloved as male lovers typically do. Lying in bed, Phoebe indulges in a daydreaming reverie of Ganymede, itemizing his body: first his locks which, being amber-hued, passeth the wreath that Phoebus puts on to make his front glorious; his brow of ivory was like the seat where love and majesty sits enthroned to enchain fancy; his eyes as bright as the burnishing of the heaven, darting forth frowns with disdain and smiles with favor,

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lightning such looks as would inflame desire, were she wrapped in the circle of the frozen zone.67 Evoking the untouchable Laura of Petrarchan writing, Lodge enhances the classical idea of beauty embodied by Ganymede with the aesthetic repertoire of Renaissance love verse and the blazoning of women. In the romance tradition, the blending of Ovidian and Petrarchan styles of describing the physical aspects of a woman is typical of the Neo-Platonic idea of beauty.68 Lodge employs this stylistic principle to present Ganymede as the origin of physical, spiritual, and sexual pleasure throughout the romance. Ganymede’s ambiguous, trans­ vestite, and assumed masculinity is a source of and force for sexual pleasure, but his erotic signification remains obscure; his form of embodiment challenges the idea of heroic masculinity presented elsewhere in Lodge’s romance. Lodge’s use of the Ovidian myth of Ganymede links Rosalind to Book X of the Metamorphoses.69 In this book, Ovid tells how [t]he king of gods once burned with love for Phrygian Ganymede, and something was found which Jove would rather be than what he was … Without delay he cleft the air on his lying wings and stole away the Trojan boy, who even now, though against the will of Juno, mingles the nectar and attends the cups of Jove.”70 Ovid turns the well-known myth about abduction into verses that allude to both homosocial and homoerotic desire involving the “Trojan boy” and Jove, and Lodge recasts these lines. He naturalizes transvestism in his romance of unheroic masculinity. Lodge, at the same time, de-naturalizes male heroic comportment without compromising virtuous heroism. In the story of Jove and his Trojan boy, Lodge imagines an alternative fiction of desire to that of heteronormative sexuality promoted in the main love narrative, replacing the idea of male violence over women to their violence over another male. To refuse a bond with a woman, the Jove/Ganymede story also rejects “the bond of dependency” of male sexuality over women, allowing men “to remain aloof from an other.”71 From Phoebe’s commentary on Ovid’s Cupid, as told in the Remedia amoris, to the Ganymede episodes, Rosalind displays the inescapability of Ovid as a literary source for writing queer representations of

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masculinity, and of the rejection of heroic masculinity as a form of male self-identification. The influence of “effeminate Ovid,” as one of Lodge’s contemporaries pejoratively described the Roman poet72 because of his interest in love and sex, changed the representation of masculinity in romance from one “indicated by action and initiative”73 to a masculinity determined by emotions and sexual desire. The unheroic knight of prose romance is energized by love and sex, pulled away from the pursuit of political ambition and military goals and propelled towards the unpredictability of romantic love and desire. The Ovidian male of prose romance is an alternative to a heroic male embodied in the figure of the errant knight. This figure seeks not to replace heroism with amorousness, but rather make desire, not combat, the battlefield of man’s life as both a public and private place for his restless agency.

Not e s   1 Frederick S. Boas, “Ovid and the Elizabethans” (London: The English Association, 1947), 2.  2 Ovid, Heroides and Amores, trans. Grant Showerman, rev. ed. C.P. Goold (Cambridge, M A: Harvard University Press, 1986). “Militat omnis amans, et habet sua castra Cupido … quae bello est habilis, Veneri quoque ­convenit actas.” (I.ix.1, 3).  3 Ovid, The Art of Love and Other Poems, trans. J.H. Mozley, rev. G P. Goold (Cambridge, M A: Harvard University Press, 1985). “Militiae ­species amor est; discedite, segnes: / Non sunt haec timidis signa tuenda viris.” (II.233-4). I thank Jackie Cameron for discussing with me the ideas developed in this chapter.   4 Victoria Rimmell, Ovid’s Lovers: Desire, Difference, and the Poetic Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 20016), 13.   5 W.P. Ker, Epic and Romance (New York: Dover, 1957), 47.   6 For a critical overview of Ovidian imitation in the English Renaissance, see Colin Burrow, “Re-embodying Ovid: Renaissance Afterlives,” The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, ed. Philip Hardie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 301–19.   7 Helen Moore, “Elizabethan Fiction and Ovid’s Heroides,” Translation and Literature 9.1 (2000): 40, 40–64.   8 Ibid., 41.

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  9 In her book, Milton and the Metamorphosis of Ovid (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), Maggie Kilgour has written about Ovid’s use of Virgil and about the interconnectedness, as well as difference, between these two classical poets (xv, 52–4, 79–80, 118–19, and 149–50) as ­models for early modern English literature. 10 Colin Burrow, Epic Romance: Homer to Milton (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1993), 3. 11 Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, vol. 1 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1961), 136. 12 Lynn Enterline, “Elizabethan Minor Epic,” The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, vol. 2, 1558–1660, ed. Patrick Cheney and Philip Hardie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 253, 253–89. 13 Robert Greene refers to George Turberville, who translated the Heroides, and he refers directly to Arthur Golding’s “industrious toil in Englishing Ovid’s Metamorphosis.” See Robert Greene, Menaphon: Camilla’s Alarm to slumbering Euphues in his melancholy cell at Silexedra, ed. Brenda Cantar (Ottawa: Dovehouse, 1996), 89. Other works in which Greene refers to Ovid include: Gwydonius or The Card of Fancy (1584), Alcida, Grreenes Metamorphosis (?1588; 1617), Morando, The Tritameron of Loue (1587), Mamilia: A Mirrour of looking-glasse for the Ladies of Englande (1583), Orpharion (1599), and The Repentance of Robert Greene (1592). 14 Lorna Hutson, The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England (London and New York: Routledge, 1994). 15 Colin Burrow, Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 96. 16 Lynn Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 87. 17 Jenny Mann, page 24. An illustration of this practice can be illustrated by John Brinsley’s point made in The Grammar Schoole (1612), a teaching manual in which he instructs the schoolmaster to read Ovidian verse with the purpose of encouraging his pupils to write their own poetry: “Read them [the pupils] the verse of Ovid, that they may see that themselves have made the very same; or wherein they missed: this shall much incourage and assure them.” Quoted from Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 21–2. Brinsley follows Roger Ascham, who, in The Scholemaster (1570, 1589) states that, from Chaucer to the

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early Tudor poets, English writers in “translating Ovide … have gone as farre to their great praise, as the copie they followed could carry them.” See The Scholemaster, ed. John E.B. Mayor (London 1863; facs. New York: A MS Press, 1967), 177. See also, Ovid in English, 1480–1625, Part I: Metamorphoses, ed. Susan Annes Brown and Andrew Taylor, MH R A Tudor and Stuart Translations, vol. 4 (1) (London: The Modern Humanities Research Association, 2013), 3–4. 18 Raphael Lyne, Ovid’s Changing Worlds: English Metamorphoses, 1567–1632 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 36. 19 Helen Moore, “Prose Romance,” The Oxford History of Classical Reception of English Literature, vol. 2, 1558–1660, ed. Patrick Cheney and Philip Hardie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 295, 291–310. 20 Bruce R. Smith, Shakespeare and Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 15. 21 Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, M A: Harvard University Press, 1992), 121. 22 Valerie Traub, “Introduction – Feminist Shakespeare Studies: Crosscurrents, Border Crossings, Conflicts, and Contradictions,” The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment, ed. Valerie Traub (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 3. 23 Ibid., 1. 24 A recent collection of essays revises and expands the ways in which gender-based criticism re-assesses Ovid’s work. See Ovidian Transversions: “Iphis and Ianthe,” 1300–1650, ed. Valerie Traub, Patricia Badir, and Peggy McCracken (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019). 25 Niklas Holzberg, Ovid: The Poet and His Work, trans. G.M. Goshgarian (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2002), 46. 26 I borrow the term from Colin Burrow’s essay, “Re-embodying Ovid,” 301–19. 27 In the Elizabethan program of education, in which one of the main goals was the cultivation of genteel masculinity, classroom teaching involved practising how to imitate Ovid’s stories and narratives in new creative writing, and how to transform the language of male and female lovers from Ovidian poetry into new literary voices. This practice lies at the heart of Elizabethan writers’ transformation of Ovid’s poetry of amorous desire into prose narratives and epistolary rhetoric that give voice to romantic masculinity. Thus, in the preface to a school text, Ouids Metamorphosis Translated Grammatically, and also according to the propriety of our English tongue, so farre as Grammar and the verse will well beare. Written

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chiefly for the good of Schooles (London: Humphrey Lowens for Thomas Man, 1618), one reads the following: “for all the Latine and stile vsed in it, who knoweth not, that as in all Ouids works, so chiefly in his Metamorphoses his singular wit and eloquence doe appeare: that we may truly say, that neuer heathen Poet wrote more sweetly in such an easie and flowing veine, that hee in this.” (sig. ¶1r). 28 Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia), ed. Jean Robertson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), xvi. 29 John Barsby, Ovid (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 14–15. 30 Thomas Habinek, “Ovid and Empire,” The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, 59, 46–61. 31 Ovid, Heroides, trans. Showerman, IV.75. 32 Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia), ed. Jean Robertson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 235. 33 Ibid., 234. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., 240. 36 Ibid., 235. 37 Ibid., 240. 38 Ibid. 39 Susan Wiseman, Writing Metamorphosis in the English Renaissance, 1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 9. 40 Palmerin of England. The [first-] second part of the no lesse rare, then excellent and stately historie, of the famous and fortunate prince Palmerin of England and Florian de Desart his brother. Translated out of French, by A[nthony] M[unday]. (London: Thomas Creede and Bernard Alsop, 1616), C6r. 41 “For Narcissus had reached his sixteenth year and might seem either boy or man” (“namque ter ad quinos unum Cephisius annum / addiderat poteratque puer iuvenisque videri”). Ovid, Metamorphoses, Books I-VIII, trans. Frank Justus Miller, rev. G P. Goold (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1994), III.351-2. 42 Ovid, Heroides in Heroides and Amores, trans. Showerman, XIX.181 (“hoc nautae metuunt, Leandre, natare; / exitus his fractic puppibus esse solet.” XIX.185-6). 43 Colin Burrow has shown Ludovico Ariosto’s reliance on the story of Dido and Aeneas from the Heroides to shape Dido’s “complaint about her ­maltreatment” to a “perfidious Aeneas” in his romance epic, Orlando furioso. Burrow demonstrates that the influence of Ovid on the Ariostean epic is most evocatively present in looking back at Ovid for inventing a

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language of emotion that suits romance (as Chaucer did in The House of Fame). See Epic Romance, 60. 44 Jennifer Ingleheart documents how “an unusual portrayal of ancient homosexuality” introduced in literature by the figure of Orpheus produces anxiety in early modern readers’ encounters with English Renaissance texts that take up such classical significations. See “The Invention of (Thracian) Homosexuality: The Ovidian Orpheus in the English Renaissance,” in Ancient Rome and the Construction of Modern Homosexual Identities, ed. Jennifer Ingleheart (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 58, 56–73. 45 Cynthia Marshall writes that the image of woman’s dismemberment “reminds us that the lost parts – her hands, her tongue – are those through which a woman might express herself and also those through which she could be active as a sexual being.” The Shattering of the Self: Violence, Subjectivity, and Early Modern Texts (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 131. 46 For an illuminating discussion of how objective knowledge of the physical world and the subjectivity of art work together within ekphrasis in early modern poetry and drama, see Rachel Eisendrath, Poetry in a World of Things: Aesthetics and Empiricism in Renaissance Ekphrasis (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2018). 47 Felicity is one of humanist fiction’s principle goals, as suggested by Arthur F. Kinney in Humanist Poetics: Thought, Rhetoric, and Fiction in Sixteenth-Century England (Amherst, M A: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1986). 48 Nandini Das, Renaissance Romance: The Transformations of English Prose Fiction, 1570–1620 (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011), 51. 49 Richard Johnson, The Seven Champions of Christendom (1596/7), ed. Jennifer Fellows (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003). 50 Ibid., 154. 51 Ovid, Amores, III.ix.21-2: “quid pater Ismario, quid mater profuit Orpheo? / carmine quid victas obstipuisse feras?” 52 Burrow, “Re-embodying,” 305. 53 Johnson, The Seven Champions, 154. 54 Stephen Guy-Bray, Homoerotic Space: The Poetics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), esp. 24–84. 55 Ovid, Metamorphoses, X.710. 56 See John S. Garrison, “Love will tear us apart: Campion’s Umbra and Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis,” Elizabethan Narrative Poems: The State of Play, ed. Lynn Enterline (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 167–88.

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57 Thomas Lodge, Rosalind, ed. Donald Beecher (Ottawa: Dovehouse, 1997), 198. The translation of The Remedies of Love is quoted from Ovid, The Art of Love and Other Poems, ed. J.H. Mozley (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1985), 139–40. 58 Lodge, Rosalind, 198. 59 Ibid. 60 “Adfluit incautis insidiosus Amor. / Desidiam puer ille sequi solet, odit agentes: / Da vacuae menti, quo teneatur, opus. / Sunt for a, sunt leges, sunt, quos tuearis, amici: / Vade per urbanae splendida castra togae.” Ovid, The Art of Love, 148-52. 61 Lodge, Rosalind, 211. 62 Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 94. 63 Derek G. Neal traces this shift in relation to the idea of “the private self” and the expression of desire, in the chapter, “Toward the Private Self: Desire, Masculinity, and Middle English Romance,” in The Masculine Self in Late Medieval England (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 187–239. 64 Ker, Epic; Burrow, Epic. 65 Elizabeth A. Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex and Marriage (London and New York: Longman, 1999), 93. 66 On the one-sex model of gender transformed as the subject of stage drama, see Stephen Greenblatt, “Fiction and Friction,” Shakespearean Negotiations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 66–93. For a critique of the one-sex model, see Janet Adelman, “Making Defect Perfection: Shakespeare and the One-Sex Model,” Enacting Gender on the English Renaissance Stage, ed. Viviana Comensoli and Anne Russell (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 23–52. 67 Lodge, Rosalind, 20–3. 68 A mixture of Petrarchan and Ovidian styles and discourses intertwine Neo-Platonic love and Ovidian sexuality in Book III of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Kilgour, Milton and the Metamorphosis, 71–2. 69 In Robert Greene’s prose romance, The Spanish Masquerado (London: Roger Ward for Thomas Cadman, 1589), Ganymede is associated with illicit sexuality, C1r. Ganymede is linked with homoerotic desire in the anonymous romance, The third and last part of Palmerin of England, Enterlaced with the loues and fortunes of many gallant knights and ladies, trans. Anthony Munday (London: by J[ames] R[oberts]. for William Leake, 1602), Gg4r. James Saslow has shown that the myth of Jove and Ganymede was abundantly recycled in different art forms in the

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Renaissance, and that variations of male same-sex desire were often ­implicated in such representations. See Ganymede in the Renaissance: Homosexuality in Art and Society (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), 1986. 70 Ovid, Metamorphoses, Books IX-XV, trans. Frank Justus Miller (Cambridge, M A: Harvard University Press, 1984), X.155-161 (“Rex superum Phrygii quondam Ganymedis amore arsit, et inventum est ­aliquid, quod Iuppiter esse, quam quod erat, mallet … nec mora, percusso mendacibus aere pennis abripit Iliaden; qui nunc quoque pocula miscet invitaque Iovi nectar Iunone ministrat.”) 71 I borrow this language from Froma I. Zeitlin, Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 229. I thank Hana Nikcevic for suggesting I should consult this book and for her help with this essay. 72 George Abott, An exposition vpon the prophet Jonah contained in certaine sermons, preached in S. Marias church in Oxford (London: Richard Field, 1600), sig. E5r. 73 Patricia Simons, The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 35.

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7 After Ovid’s Sappho: Muteness Envy, Female Masculinity, and the Ethics of Mutability Melissa E. Sanchez

With their sustained attention to male erotic conquest, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Amores, and Ars amatoria tend to get the lion’s share of attention in discussions of masculinity. The Heroides, by contrast, have usually been the province of feminist criticism attentive to representations of specifically female speech and agency, on the one hand, and the ravages of compulsory heterosexuality, on the other. In Heroides 15, the epistle from Sappho to Phaon, in particular, Ovid’s ventriloquism of a female poet’s voice and his heterosexualization of Sappho have seemed, to many readers, to secure the gender and sexual norms that sustain male power.1 While Ovid has certainly been instrumental to a literary tradition that valorizes male domination, I propose that Ovid’s Sappho also represents an alternative to the position of abandoned and helpless lover, one that John Donne, centuries later, takes up in his own “Sappho to Philaenis.” This is a model that eschews an association of constancy with moral authority and responds to unrequitedness not by pleading or pining, but by moving on. Heroides 15 thereby provides a useful site for theorizing masculinity beyond its usual association with violence and domination. It also allows us to apprehend erotic mutability not simply as the self-serving, even abusive, libertinism often associated with both Ovid and Donne, but also as an alternative to an ideal of constancy as a moral virtue in itself – an ideal that can validate aggression against self and other. Speaking through the explicitly racialized figure of the lesbian2 poet Sappho, Ovid denaturalizes what has come to seem an established

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association of speech and passion with (white) heteromasculinity, on the one hand, and silence and passivity with (white) heterofemininity, on the other. Ovid’s Phaon practices the coldness and cruelty conventionally attached to a long line of female love objects – most famously, Daphne in the Metamorphoses, whose transformation into a laurel tree at once thwarts Apollo’s rape attempt and instantiates an ideological structure in which poetic fame compensates for erotic frustration. Barbara Johnson designates this structure “muteness envy,” and traces its redescription of unrequitedness as victimization to the end that claims to wretchedness and loss sustain male sexual prerogative and social power. Explaining the gendered operations of muteness envy, Johnson writes: Far from being the opposite of authority, victimhood would seem to be the most effective model for authority, particularly literary and cultural authority. It is not that the victim always gets to speak – far from it – but that the most highly valued speaker gets to claim victimhood. This is what leads readers of Apollo and Daphne to see Apollo’s failed rape as “loss,” or readers of “the voice of the shuttle” to say that there is always something that violates “us.” If feminism is so hotly resisted, it is perhaps less because it substitutes women’s speech for women’s silence than because, in doing so, it interferes with the official structures of self-pity that keep patriarchal power in place, and, in the process, tells the truth behind the beauty of muteness envy.3 Jack Halberstam further illuminates the centrality of suffering to conventional understandings of masculinity, observing that the “dual mechanism of a lack of care for the self and a callous disregard for the care of others” means that “masochism is built into male masculinity, and the most macho of spectacles is the battered male body, a bloody hunk of ruined flesh, stumbling out of the corner for yet another round.”4 Johnson’s pining lover and Halberstam’s battered prizefighter converge in their refusal to give up. Getting hurt becomes a sign of strength and, at the same time, justifies inflicting harm in return. Muteness envy and masochism reverse roles of aggressor and victim and thereby justify violence as self-defense. Ovid’s “Sappho to Phaon” and Donne’s “Sappho to Philaenis” illuminate the unstable relationship between masculinity, manhood, and muteness envy. Along with their play with the gender of speaker

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and object choice, Ovid and Donne both imagine in Sappho the possibility of resisting the violent dynamic of muteness envy that requires the sacrifice of self or other. Instead, Ovid’s Sappho imagines an alternative goal that Donne’s Sappho realizes: to forget Phaon. In Donne’s elegy, Sappho has returned to her former female objects, a change that retrospectively casts the heteroerotic desire of Ovid’s epistle as a temporary experiment and prospectively allows the possibility that Philaenis will not be the last to capture her heart. Dismissing the attractions of “Phao” and other “soft boy[s],” Donne’s Sappho addresses Philaenis, whose name in early modern culture would most likely have conjured up Martial’s epigrams on a muscular tribade equally apt to penetrate men and women. Donne’s version of Sappho further destabilizes the relation between masculinity and muteness envy by ending the elegy with the acknowledgment that she may again “change.” Read in conversation with Ovid’s Sappho, Donne’s Sappho is evidence not that lesbianism (or desire as such) is necessarily tragic but that suffering need not be permanent. The masculine mutability often contrasted unfavourably with feminine devotion – a central motif of the Heroides as a whole – may itself offer a refuge from the dynamic of muteness envy and the (often gendered) violence it authorizes. Sappho would seem to be an odd model for alternative masculinities: Sapphism in both misogynist and lesbian separatist imaginations is often taken as the rejection of men and masculinity.5 But such a binary view of natural masculinity and femininity, as Halberstam observes, has led female masculinity to be “vilified by heterosexist and feminist/womanist programs alike.” Male femininity “fulfills a kind of ritual function in male homosocial cultures,” Halberstam argues, but “female masculinity is generally received by hetero- and homonormative cultures as a pathological sign of misidentification and maladjustment, as longing to be and to have a power that is always just out of reach.”6 Halberstam questions a binary system that limits masculinity to those assigned male at birth and accordingly celebrates or demonizes it, proposing that we instead examine how “female-born people have been making convincing and powerful assaults on the coherence of male masculinity for well over a hundred years” thereby revealing “the possibilities of an active matrix of exchange between male and female masculinities.”7 In particular, the figure of the butch – one that, I argue below, we can productively associate with both Sappho and Philaenis – facilitates our ability to “imagine a plethora

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of new masculinities that do not simply feed back into the static loop that makes maleness plus power into the formula for abuse but that re-create masculinity on the model of female masculinity.”8 Ovid’s and Donne’s poems attest that the assault on “the coherence of male masculinity” has, in fact, been going on for well over two thousand years, even if it has not been understood in terms of the modern homo-hetero divide. These elegies – both, not coincidentally, subjected to doubts over their authenticity – turn our attention to the persistence of Sappho as a figure that queers modern associations between birth-assigned sex, sexual desire, and gendered expression (including writing as a masculine prerogative).9 Read from this perspective, both Ovid’s and Donne’s versions of Sappho reject the masculinity with which their male authors may be complicit and thereby allow us to challenge a singular definition of masculinity as a combination of masochism and dominance. The different configurations of gender, sexuality, and embodiment in the two poems illuminate the “multiplicity of masculinities” available for women as well as men.10 In particular, I want to think about Ovid’s and Donne’s versions of Sappho as instances of female masculinity that call for “new and self-conscious affirmations of different gender taxonomies.”11 Insofar as two poets who have been central to the white, Western canon speak through the racialized figure of the lesbian poet Sappho, they may not so much co-opt the voice of modern masculinity’s abject other – dark-skinned, female, “homosexual” – as register the suppressions of past alternatives that sustain this view of a Western tradition of poetry, gender, and sexuality.12

B e yo n d M u t eness Critics have often taken Heroides 15 as an unequivocal performance of the silencing of both female speech and lesbian desire. To be sure, Ovid’s Sappho claims that the poetic prowess that flourished when she pursued women has been extinguished by Phaon’s lack of response: “I wish that eloquence were mine now, but grief / kills my art and woe stops my genius” (140; nunc vellem facunda forem! dolor artibus obstat, / ingeniumque meis substitit omne malis, 195-6).13 But this claim can only be ironic, given that it comes toward the end of a 220-line poem. It is by now a critical commonplace that Ovid’s ventriloquism of Sappho is also a form of poetic competition. The opening of Heroides 15, accordingly, introduces Sappho first and foremost as

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a renowned poet, even as it queries the relationship between reputation, the materiality of writing, and stylistic singularity: Tell me, when you saw these letters from my eager hand could your eye recognize the sender or did you fail to recognize their author until you could read my name, “Sappho”? Since I am famous for the lyric do you wonder why my lines vary in length? But I weep and tears fit well the elegy – a lyre cannot bear the weight of tears. (133) Ecquid, ut adspecta est studiosae littera dextrae, Protinus est oculis cognita nostra tuis – an, nisi legisses auctoris nomina Sapphus, hoc breve nescires unde movetur opus? Foristan et quare mea sint alterna requires carmina, cum lyricis sim magis apta modis. flendus amor meus est – elegiae flebile Carmen; non facit ad lacrimas barbitos ulla meas. (1-8) In preserving Sappho’s name while co-opting its symbolic meaning, Ovid endeavours to become the author, or originator, of a new Sappho. In this temporal reversal, it is Sappho who imitates Ovid’s elegiac verse. But the silencing or erasure of Sappho must fail in order for the poem to succeed. Ovid’s desire to displace Sappho requires him to perpetuate her reputation and to accentuate the difference between her lyrics and his own elegy. It would hardly be impressive to overtake an unknown poet who cannot say, as Sappho does, “my name is known all over the earth” (134; iam canitur toto nomen in orbe meum, 28). If the historical Sappho disappears altogether, taking on the purely mythological status of the other voices of the Heroides, Ovid’s own achievement in rewriting her is diminished. Accordingly, acknowledgment of Sappho’s poetic prowess is central to the success of Ovid’s poem. Recalling a lost moment of requited desire, Sappho begs Phaon to remember not her feminine attractions, but the power of her song: “If nature denies me the gift of beauty, let my name’s measure be my stature” (134; si mihi difficilis formam

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natura negavit / ingenio formae damna repende meo, 31-2). Not feminine beauty or modesty, but poetic vigour is what formerly aroused Phaon: But my beauty seemed sufficient when you heard me read my songs; you insisted then that those words made me forever beautiful. I would sing – I remember, for all lovers remember all – and while I sang you were busy stealing kisses from me. (134-5) At mea cum legerem, sat iam Formosa videbar; unam iurabas usque decere loqui. cantabam, memini – meminerunt omnia amantes – oscula cantata tu mihi rapta dabas. (41-4) Unlike the silent or absent objects of conventional lyric address, Phaon actively wooed when he “insisted” (iurabas) that Sappho’s speech or words (loqui) adorned her person. Paradoxically, Phaon responds to her irresistible lyrics by aggressively interrupting and silencing their expressions of desire. The Latin also makes osculum, or “mouth,” a metonym for “kiss.” Insofar as these oscula are rapta, stolen or ravished, Sappho’s songs are disrupted and momentarily silenced not by being refused but by being requited, as is the erotic will that drives them. The speechlessness of satiety is literalized, again, in George Turberville’s translation, which, as M.L. Stapleton observes, went through multiple printings and remained the standard English edition until the middle of the seventeenth century.14 Turberville translates the subsequent lines that describe Sappho’s post-coital stillness thus: And that when both our ioyes confounded were, I lay With wearie limnes and langor lame, and had no worde to say. (110v) et quod, ubi amborum fuerat fonusa voluptas, plurimus in lasso corpore languor erat. (49-50)

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In this instance, Turberville supplements the mingling of pleasure and languor of Ovid’s lines with Sappho’s claim that she “had no worde to say.” If sexual success silences and replaces poetry, the beloved’s response and willingness to satisfy may endanger eloquence more than the rejection and frustration that the elegy so vocally laments – as will a long line of Petrarchan lyrics. Muteness, in other words, may not always be a bad thing. If frustration incites speech and agency and satiation renders them superfluous, another passage draws attention to the violence that the experience of sadness or helplessness can motivate. Here, Sappho compares herself not to the victimized Philomela, but to her sister Procne, whose vengeance takes the form of self-wounding: Even the branches have given up their leaves and no birds are singing their sweet songs. Only the bird of Daulis, that grief-stricken mother who brought an awful revenge to her lord, cries for Itys of Ismarus. The pitiable bird sings of Itys, while Sappho sings her song of love abandoned. There is no more but night-time silence. (138) quin etiam rami postitis lugere videntur frondibus, et nullae dulce queruntur aves; sola virum non ulta pie maestissima mater concinit Ismarium Daulias ales Ityn. ales Ityn, Sappho desertos cantata amores hactenus; ut media cetera nocte silent. (151-6) This recalls the opening lines, which recognized that elegiae flebile carmen (the elegy is the song of sadness – but also weakness, loss). Here, Procne’s lamentation for Itys, the son she has murdered, breaks the stillness of the woods, merging in harmony with Sappho’s song of love abandoned. The comparison itself warns of the danger of muteness envy as an alibi for violence. Procne’s non ulta pie (unholy, shameless, awful) infanticide responded to Philomela’s rape and ­torture with a masculine act of wounding herself (through the loss of her beloved son) in order to hurt Tereus. As maestissima mater, and as what Jane O. Newman has read as an emblem of female

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vengeance and solidarity, Procne illuminates the uncertain dynamic of agency, victimization, and brutality that complicates Sappho’s simple song of “love abandoned.”15 In leaving behind Procne – as well as the models of vengeance provided by a few other of Ovid’s female heroines, most famously Phaedra, Medea, and Deianira – Sappho entertains the need for a different ending to her own story. Significantly, it is after her joint song with Procne that Sappho recounts the alternative she is offered to destruction of self or beloved: moving on. Although the Leucadian leap is, in most mythological accounts, suicide, within at least the present tense of Heroides 15 Sappho understands it as offering the comfort of oblivion. She cites a myth, probably of Ovid’s own invention, in which Deucalion was able to forget Pyrrha after jumping from the cliff: Deucalion, consumed with love for Pyrrha, threw himself down, striking the sea without harming his body. The man’s passion left the heart that was beneath the waves and Deucalion was free of love’s pain. (139) hinc se Deucalion Phrrhae succensus amore misit, et inlaeso corpore pressit aquas. nec mora, versus amor fugit lentissima mersi pectora, Deucalion igne levatus erat. (167-70) Deucalion offers an alternative to the model of hopeless devotion rehearsed in so many of the other letters of the Heroides – Sappho exhorts Phaon to write back not as a sign that his love has been rekindled, but as a coup de grace that will put an end to her desire. If Phaon does not love her, she concludes, “at least you must permit a letter / cruel though it must surely be to tell me this woe / and I will find my fate in Leucadia’s waves” (141; hoc saltem miserae crudelis epistula dicat, / ut mihi Leucadiae fata petantur aquae! 219-20). Sappho may be restored to her former self, extinguishing the burning (igne) of love, by emulating the male model of inconstancy that has been condemned by the previous fifteen letters and, up until this point, by her own.

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To say that Donne’s poem is “after Ovid” is not only to register the temporal sequence of imitation, influence, and competition that brings these two male poets together. It is also to posit a description of the fictional temporality of Donne’s poem: “Sappho to Philaenis” takes seriously the Leucadian leap as not causing death but making possible life after Phaon. In Donne’s poem, Phaon is no longer a singularly desirable object who will tempt male and female gods. Instead, “My Phao” is “such as” Philaenis – these lovers are interchangeable. Donne’s “Sappho to Philaenis” opens with a meditation on poetic authorship that corrects Ovid’s statement of female heteroerotic constancy. Here, Sappho has realized the hope of changed affection with which Heroides 15 left off: Where is that holy fire which verse is said To have? Is that enchanting force decayed? Verse, that draws Nature’s works from Nature’s law, Thee, her best work, to her work cannot draw. Have my tears quenched my old poetic fire? Why quenched they not as well that of desire? Thoughts, my mind’s creatures, often are with thee, But I, their maker, want their liberty. Only thine image in my heart doth sit, But that is wax, and fires environ it. My fires have driven, thine have drawn it hence; And I am robbed of picture, heart, and sense. Dwells with me still mine irksome memory, Which both to keep and lose grieves equally. (1-14) In Donne’s elegy as in Ovid’s, Sappho’s verse is caught between the pursuit of permanence and the projection of oblivion. Philaenis’s “image” is equally “irksome memory” and therefore an object of ambivalent desire and repulsion. If we understand the past of Ovid’s Heroides as prologue to Donne’s “Sappho to Philaenis,” we can also postulate the mutability of this renewed lesbian passion as an alternative to both the tragic heteroerotic devotion of Sappho’s mythical suicide and the equally tragic homopoetics – the failure to create perfect union and likeness – that Paula Blank has located in the conclusion of Donne’s elegy.16 In prying injurious devotion apart from a moral hierarchy equally employed by a patriarchal ideology of

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muteness envy and a feminist ideology of constancy and commitment, we can view the cessation of love as other than blameworthy or tragic. Acknowledging the potential value of inconstancy to women can also challenge the assumption that a depiction of erotic mutability and nonmutuality is necessarily antifeminist. In Ben Saunders’ words, “The possibility that Donne deliberately and self-consciously intended to complicate our response to the ‘masculinism’ of some of his libertine Ovidian verse by juxtaposing poems that articulate or ventriloquize female desire in similarly ‘masculine’ terms … must surely complicate any simple assertion of his misogyny.”17 Donne’s assumption that the Leucadian cure has succeeded complicates associations of erotic inconstancy with misogynistic exploitation of women. What if the women in the Heroides could find new loves as easily the poems’ men seem to? This may be the position of the lesbian as much as the libertine, and Pamela Gordon and Judith P. Hallet have accordingly stressed the resemblance of Ovid’s Sappho to the Ovidian voice of the Amores and to Catullus’s poems to Lesbia.18 If, as Ovid has it, Sappho can forget the “hundred” women she loved before Phaon, and if, as Donne has it, she can forget Phaon, then perhaps she can also forget Philaenis. Sappho’s leap from the Leucadian cliffs can be understood not as a sign of heterosexual despair in response to Phaon’s cold libertinism, but as a hopeful renewal of the surprise and vulnerability that comes with desire – a fresh start that Donne’s poem gives her.

Whi t e n e s s , M as c u l in it y, and Lyri c Devoti on Open to the possibility of moving on, Ovid’s Sappho rejects a model in which victimization legitimates violence when she decides to jump from the cliffs of Leucas. Muteness envy is also part of a long genealogy in which masculine dominance is associated with racial as well as gender hierarchy. To take one contemporary instance, Halberstam has argued that “masculinity … becomes legible as masculinity where and when it leaves the white male middle-class body. Arguments about excessive masculinity tend to focus on black bodies (male and female), Latino/a bodies, or working-class bodies, and insufficient masculinity is all too often figured by Asian bodies or upper-class bodies; these stereotypical constructions of variable masculinity mark the process by which masculinity becomes dominant in the sphere of white middleclass maleness.”19 If we take seriously the attention to skin colour in both Ovid’s and Donne’s poems, we can understand the inattention

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to race in criticism of these poems as enacting what Halberstam describes as the “double exclusion of nonwhite men and nonmale masculinity that must properly be accounted for to produce the history of relations between manliness and civilization.”20 Ovid and Donne, writing amidst two signal moments in Western cultural history – the Roman Empire and the English Renaissance – simultaneously evoke and complicate a longstanding association between masculinity, whiteness, and literary authority. In this section, I hope to show that looking for markers of race, rather than assuming it is not there, also refines our perception of gender. Ovid’s and Donne’s versions of Sappho make legible the structuring force of race in poetic and critical accounts of masculinity and femininity, heterosexuality and lesbianism. In Heroides 15, Sappho’s darkness may signal difference from the classical, imperial virtus about which Ovid was so notoriously ambivalent. Given Sappho’s longstanding association with Asiatic otherness to both Hellenistic and Roman culture, and Ovid’s own emphasis on Sappho’s darkness, it is surprising that there has been (to my knowledge) little critical comment on the racial dimension of the poem’s gendered and sexual dynamics.21 Above, I discussed Sappho’s emphasis on the beauty of her verse rather than that of her person. I want now to turn attention to subsequent verses in which Sappho describes her skin colour: If nature denies me the gift of beauty, let my name’s measure be my stature. If this my beauty does not dazzle your eyes, then recall that dark Andromeda was beautiful to Perseus though she was dark with the hue of her native land. What is more, white pigeons often mate with birds of a darker colour and the black turtledove is loved by birds of green plumage. (134) sim brevis, at nomen, quod terras inpleat omnes, est mihi; mensuram nominis ipsa fero. candida si non sum, placuit Cepheia Perseo Andromede, patriae fusca colore suae. et variis albae iunguntur saepe columbae, et niger a viridi turtur amatur ave. (33-8)

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In Sappho’s declaration that candida … non sum, the Latin candida shares the synthesis of aesthetic and racial categories that Kim F. Hall has traced in the English word “fair”: it makes whiteness a synonym for beauty.22 Lacking fairness, Sappho likens herself to the Ethiopian princess Andromeda “patriae fusca colore suae” (dark, dusky, or black with the colour of her homeland) who nonetheless pleased (placuit) the Greek Perseus. (This example of what would now be called interracial union is repeated in the figure of the white pigeon that mates with birds of other colours and the green turtledove’s willingness to choose black (niger) mates.) Andromeda’s Ethiopian heritage is accentuated by the adjective Cepheia, derived from her father, the Ethiopian king Cepheus. In a correspondence preceding Ovid and summed up by Jeremiah’s famous question, “Can the Ethiope change his skin? or the leopard his spots?” (Jeremiah 13:23), the Ethiopian was proverbial for indelible blackness that penetrated to the soul. In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, dark skin could equally signal spiritual difference and inferiority, as we see in the Geneva Bible’s translation of Jeremiah’s first question as “Can the black More change his skin”? This persistence appears in Turberville’s version of the above passage from Heroides 15, which similarly conflates white Christendom’s racialized religious enemies: Put case I be not faire; swarth Andromed to vewe, Duke Perseus pleased: Morisco soyls allowde hir tawnie hewe. (110r) Moriscos, we know, were African inhabitants of Spain who had converted from Islam to Christianity. Sappho’s absence of “faire”-ness, in Turberville’s sixteenth-century English as in Ovid’s classical Latin, is explicitly likened to the “swarth” or “tawnie” Andromeda as passive victim rescued by Perseus. This narrative, in terms of early modern political, racial, and religious vocabularies, blurs the distinction between rescue and conquest. Sappho’s own blackness aligns her with a feminine figure for beauty at the same time that her poetic and sexual agency distinguish her from the helpless Andromeda. Without going too far down the rabbit hole of this myth, I want to recall that Andromeda is also the other of Medusa. The Gorgon’s astonishing stare both justifies Perseus’ decapitation of her and makes her a weapon

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against the monster who threatens Andromeda in an allegory that, as Freud famously argued, registered male violence as a response to the fear of castration.23 Sappho’s plea for Phaon to write back is less a plea that he play the role of Perseus in rescuing her than that he give her the information that she needs in order to rescue herself from a destructive passion. Sappho refuses to participate in a structure that contrasts an unresponsive or abandoning love object with a pining lover who is thereby sympathetic in acts of vengeance. Instead, she adopts a position of assertive and potentially faithless lover rendered in the racialized religious terms of the faithless convert by Turberville. The racialized dimension of female beauty was not lost on Donne. His Sappho raises the question of Philaenis’s appearance in the Petrarchan idiom whose idealization of whiteness Hall has traced. Although numerous lines of the poem point to the equation of whiteness and feminine beauty, critics have been oddly silent on this point, tending to treat colonization as mere metaphor for sexual domination rather than itself part of the construction of a gendered aesthetic hierarchy.24 Looking at these lines in the order in which they appear, we can see that Sappho urges us to imagine Philaenis’s fair skin throughout the poem, even as she denies that she is engaging in physical description or comparison: That tells me how fair thou art: th’art so fair As gods, when gods to thee I do compare, Are graced thereby. (15-17) Thou art not soft and clear and straight and fair As down, as stars, cedars and lilies are, But thy right hand and cheek and eye only Are like thy other hand and cheek and eye. Such was my Phao awhile, but shall be never As thou wast, art and, oh, mayst be for ever. (21-6) O cure this loving madness, and restore Me to me: thee, my half, my all, my more. So may thy cheeks’ red outwear scarlet dye, And their white, whiteness of the Galaxy. So may thy mighty amazing beauty move

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Envy in all women, and in all men, love; And so be change and sickness far from thee As thou by coming near keep’st them from me. (57-64) In the first set of lines, it is at least theoretically possible to separate the two meanings of “fair”- beautiful and white – since the point is that Philaenis makes available to the senses divine beauty that cannot otherwise be apprehended. Likening the gods to Philaenis is a compliment to them, not her. Yet, given the overwhelming premodern depiction of both Olympian gods and Christian deities as white, we cannot definitively exclude a racialized notion of beauty. When whiteness, as Hall has emphasized, becomes invisible as “race,” we as critics cease to notice that we are treating it as the default against which brown and black bodies emerge as other.25 To recall that, in the pictoral tradition of Donne and his contemporaries, gods would have been rendered fair in both senses of the word is to keep before us the racialized language of beauty in the early modern period. The likelihood that the gods to whom Sappho likens Philaenis would have been understood as white is underscored by the explicit association between fairness and whiteness in the second set of lines quoted above. These lines are usually cited as evidence that Donne’s Sappho rejects the masculine Petrarchan tradition of the blazon. Instead of such objectifying comparison to inanimate objects, this line of argument goes, Sappho celebrates Philaenis’s beauty as absolutely singular and incomparable, “only” like herself. To be sure, if we attend to the particular refusal to claim that Philaenis is as “fair” as “lilies are,” we can detect a more explicit rejection of the assurance of whiteness that Petrarchan blazons provide. This resistance is only momentary, however. By the end of the poem, Sappho adopts not only the Petrarchan convention of the blazon, but also that of claiming poetic immortality. As a result of Sappho’s writing, Philaenis’s red cheeks and white skin will “outwear,” or outlast, both the artificial red of scarlet pigment and the natural white of the Milky Way. The “clear” “stars” that Philaenis was deliberately not compared to earlier here reenter the poem as inferior because temporary figures for Philaenis’s beauty. At the same time, the repetition of “white, whiteness” condenses the comparison between the stars (whose whiteness is all the more visible against the night sky) and Philaenis’ pale skin.

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Juxtaposing stars and skin by proximity on the page, Sappho makes good the exchange of sublunary love for immortal poetry. But “Sappho to Philaenis” also destabilizes the whiteness it purports to confer. The thrice repeated “so” of the passage above situates Philaenis’ return to Sappho as part of that age-old Petrarchan economy in which love and fame are interchangeable. If Philaenis will “cure this loving madness” the “enchanting force” of Sappho’s verse will no longer be “decayed” but revivified, “So” that Philaenis’ beauty can be immortalized through poetry. The “change and sickness” that requited love will keep at bay, in a manner spelled out in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, threaten Philaenis as much as they do Sappho. The memory of “my Phao” in Donne’s poem specifically indicates that Sappho’s desire for Philaenis replaces her desire for Phaon. It also compares them through reference to the blazon. “[M]y Phao” “was” as singular as Philaenis; because each love is unique, he “shalt be never” like the past, present, or future Philaenis. This comparison of incomparability grounds the implicit threat in the final lines – if Philaenis doesn’t come near, change may – and allows that she may be as fungible as Phaon. Sappho’s awareness that her own passions and perceptions may be mutable also bespeaks an alternative to the dynamic of disappointment and aggression that is muteness envy. Ovid’s and Donne’s dark, possibly faithless Sappho imagines “change” for herself no less than for her “fair” objects. She rejects an association of whiteness with purity and faith in favour of a mutability and faithlessness that avert the sometimes lethal consequences of unrequited devotion.

B u t c h - F e m m e , T r ibade-Ci naedus When Ovid’s Sappho emphasizes her own darkness and Donne’s Sappho emphasizes Philaenis’ whiteness, this would appear also to articulate the premodern roots of the racial, gendered, and sexual intersections summarized by Halberstam in which “lesbians of color tend to be stereotyped along racial, as well as sexual, lines; the black lesbian, for example, is often stereotyped as the butch bulldagger or as sexually voracious, and so it makes no sense to talk about such a construction in terms of invisibility and spectrality.”26 As Valerie Traub and Mario DiGangi have shown, the association between non-Western women, clitoral hypertrophy, and lesbianism has a long history that works to render tribadism exotic and other, thus reserving penetration

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as the prerogative of male masculinity.27 Ovid takes part in this history by emphasizing not only Sappho’s sexual aggression but also Phaon’s softness, silence, and receptivity. Unlike the conquering heroes to which the other epistles in the Heroides are addressed, Phaon resembles the cinaedus (kinaidos in Greek), a classical figure of penetrability who was, as David M. Halperin puts it, “defined more in terms of gender than in terms of desire” and who “offended principally against the order of masculinity, not against the order of sexuality.”28 Donne amplifies the confusion, depicting an ambiguous and fluidgendered dynamic in which the roles of butch and femme, tribade and cinaedus can be only provisionally assigned. Ovid’s Sappho repeatedly highlights Phaon’s adolescence, representing Phaon as not quite a man. Turberville’s translation, in particular, distinguishes Phaon from adult masculinity: What wonder, if with such a beardless youth I were Attacht, whose tender childish yeares allowed his chinne no haire? (112r) quid mirum, si me primae lanuginis aetas abstulit, atque anii quos vir amare potest? (85-6) What Turberville’s edition obscures, however, is Phaon’s status as an object of male attraction, one who is just, as Ovid’s Latin has it, “at the start of those years when men’s love reveals its first stirring” (86). The ambiguity of atque anii quos vir amare potest like the faint, downy beard Phaon has begun to acquire, situates him between genders. Is Phaon first able to love himself or able to inspire other men’s love? Because he is nec adhuc iuvenis, nec iam puer (“neither young man nor boy”) he is utilis aetas – at a serviceable age, Sappho makes clear, for female and male lovers alike (93): It seems now that I must be afraid that you, Aurora, would steal him away and put him in the place of Cephalus, and so you would, but your first choice holds your eye.

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Phoebe should see him, she who sees all things, and it will be Phaon that she preserves in sleep; Venus might well have taken him off to the skies in her ivory chariot but she knows all too well that he might have caught the eye of her Mars himself! (136) hunc ne pro Cephalo raperes, Aurora, timebam – et faceres, sed te prima rapina tenet! hunc si conspiciat quae conspicit omnia Phoebe, iussus erit somnos coninuare Phaon; hunc Venus in caelum curru vexisset eburno, sed videt et Marti posse placere suo. (87-95) The repetition of raperes/rapina emphasizes that Phaon, like the ravished Cephalus or the unconscious Endymion, is potential victim of divine raptus. Jupitor’s ravishment of Ganymede goes conspicuously unmentioned, with female deities taking that role. But the specter of male same-sex ravishment appears in Venus’s own imagined anxiety that Phaon will attract Mars. In Sappho’s dreams Phaon is as passive and silent an object of pleasure as in the preceding Olympian fantasy: So often, it seems, I press the weight of my neck against your arms and so often do I place my arms beneath your neck. I know the kisses, the tongue’s caresses which once you enjoyed giving and getting. It seems I fondle you while uttering words that are near the truth of wakefulness and my sensation is guarded by my lips. I blush to say more, all comes to pass: Throughout every part of my body a great pleasure rushes and I discover that now I can no longer control myself I am no longer joyless and dry. (138)

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saepe tuos nostra cervice onerare lacertos, saepe tuae videor supposuisse meos; oscula cognosco, quae tu committere lingua aptaque consueras accipere, apta dare. blandior interdum verisque simillima verba eloquor, et vigilant sensibus ora meis. ulteriora pudet narrare, sed ora meis. ulteriora pudet narrare, sed ommnia fiunt, et iuvat, et siccae non licet esse mihi. (127-34) Whereas once in memory Phaon “enjoyed both giving and getting,” in Sappho’s dreams such reciprocity is absent as she presses, fondles, and speaks to him. She is equally ashamed [pudet] to share the full details and eager to assure Phaon that “all comes to pass” [ommnia fiunt]. Having been pushed past her limits [ora meis], Sappho is no longer sicca – which is often translated as “dry,” but also connotes “thirsty.” Even in fantasy, satiety silences poetry as it assuages desire. Sappho underscores this characterization of Phaon as passive and receptive when she follows her meditation on Phaon’s boyish beauty with a direct appeal: “My plea is not that you should love / but rather that you let yourself be loved by me” (136; non ut ames oro, verum ut amere sinas, 96). This depiction of Phaon as object, Sappho as agent, reminds us of the limitations of reading desire strictly in terms of the gender of object choice. To cast same-sex desire as transgressive and cross-sex desire as normative in modern terms is to miss Ovid’s play with masculinity and femininity. We can thus reconsider the import of the oft-cited lines in which Sappho declares that whereas in the past she has shamelessly loved over a hundred women [aliae centum, quas hic sine crimine amavi (19)], “Yours is now the love these maids once had” (134; inprobe, multarum quod fuit, unus habes, 20). Phaon is in the position of the hundred maids whom Sappho has loved – and left. Donne’s poem also queers masculinity and femininity, resisting scholarly taxonomies that would assign it exclusively either to the history of misogyny or that of protofeminism.29 This poem recalls that Phaon was as “soft” as “down,” evoking another indeterminate sexual and gendered classical type, the mollis (itself at the root of the eighteenth-century “molly”). In this light, Philaenis’s own dalliance

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with a “soft boy” is not as normatively heteropatriarchal as critics have often assumed: Plays some soft boy with thee? Oh there wants yet A mutual feeling that should sweeten it. His chin a thorny-hairy unevenness Doth threaten, and some daily change possess. Thy body is a natural Paradise, In whose self, unmanured, all pleasure lies, Nor needs perfection: why shouldst thou then Admit the tillage of a harsh, rough man? Men leave behind them that which their sin shows, And are as thieves traced which rob when it snows. (31-40) This “soft boy,” of course, recalls the Phaon of Ovid’s poem, just on the verge of manhood. The eruption of hair remains latent threat, adulthood immanent. Women’s potential to stay the same, celebrated in much feminist writing as the constancy that contrasts with male promiscuity, here is literalized in the changed male body that appears with puberty. A “thorny hairy unevenness” is the “change” that women will not experience. The “soft boy” has not yet become a “rough man”; the present indicative of “Plays” is temporally distinct from possibility of the modal of “shouldst … / Admit.” Sappho’s claim that “mutual feeling” is “yet” – still, up until now, nonetheless – lacking also calls attention to the rhetoricity of these lines, an attempt to persuade Philaenis from feeling anything for the man that the boy will become. And this persuasion reveals that the “mutual feeling” often ascribed to lesbian love may also be lacking, at least at this point in the poem. If Philaenis has to be persuaded, “there wants yet” a symmetry between her desires and those of Sappho. What prevents union between Sappho and Philaenis may not be the amor impossibilis traced by Valerie Traub, but Philaenis’ own lack of commitment to Sappho, her dallying with a “soft boy” and her possible susceptibility to the charms of a “rough man.”30 Attending to the mutability of premodern gender and desire also compels us to rethink the ethics of sexual practice. Sappho and Philaenis’s union has been understood as offering a nonpenetrative alternative to heterosexual intercourse. Donne’s elegy certainly imagines sex apart

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from the pollution of male ejaculate, which Sappho compares to “manure,” drawing attention to the affinity between fertilizer and excrement (36). But the oft-cited lines in which Sappho dreams of the entanglement of female “lips,” “breasts,” and “thighs” do not leave out the possibility of tribadism. Tribades were understood as enjoying not only friction (one contemporary slang term for them was “rubbers”) but penetration by a clitoris, an uncertainty compounded by the fact that “lips,” then as now, could signify both mouth and labia.31 Rather than see penetration as inevitably dominant, might we not see the ability both to penetrate and to be penetrated as a challenge to straightforward equations of masculinity with dominance and invulnerability? The name that Donne gives Sappho’s love object, in fact, indicates just such a possible alternation of sexual roles for Sappho and Philaenis. The best-known version of Philaenis is that of Martial, himself after Ovid chronologically. Martial, notoriously, depicts Philaenis as a decidedly masculine tribade who wrestles, boozes, and penetrates boys and women alike: “Philaenis the bulldyke buggers boys and hornier than a married man she screws eleven girls a day” (Pedicat pueros tribas Philaenis et tentigine saevior mariti undenas dolat in die puellas; Epigram 67, Book 2).32 This crude epigram sheds new light on a classical tradition, which Donne surely would have known, in which female masculinity and lesbianism were not unfamiliar possibilities. In Donne’s elegy, the fluidity of subject and object appears most prominently when Sappho briefly loses herself in autoerotic fantasy: “touching myself, all seems done to thee / Myself I embrace, and mine own hands I kiss, / And amorously thank myself for this” (52-4). Unlike Phaon, who is entirely passive in Sappho’s dream, Sappho here is both agent and recipient of kisses and embraces. Just as Ovid’s Sappho plays both active and passive roles with Phaon, so Donne’s Sappho may take both roles with the sort of female partner that the name “Philaenis” evokes. Neither poem conforms to the gender norms of modern heterosexuality or lesbianism. I want to conclude by situating “Sappho to Philaenis” within a history of sexuality shaped not only by classical views of masculinity as dominance, but also by Christian martyrologies that understood masculinity as the ability to endure suffering.33 The historical moment of Donne’s elegy, along with Donne’s Holy Sonnets’ own depictions of men who long to be penetrated, allow us to supplement the classical gendered and sexual taxonomies I have rehearsed above with a

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Christian view of gender that is equally unstable. We might, in light of Donne’s attention to autoeroticism and inconstancy at the end of “Sappho to Philaenis,” understand this as a rejection of Roman masculinity as impenetrable virtus and instead, a perverse Christianization of its Ovidian content. This is not the Christianization of the Ovide Moralisé. Rather, it is a meditation on the erotic demands of an imitatio Christi that, as Richard Rambuss has shown, compels modern readers to relinquish associations of masculinity with self-sovereignty and domination of others. As Rambuss details, the male believer sought to adopt the position of “Christ’s Ganymede” – cultivating the position of exposure and penetrability associated with that of just the sort of beautiful boys that appear in Ovid’s and Donne’s elegies.34 We might understand mutability as a similar exposure of the self. For, as Donne’s “Sappho to Philaenis,” no less than his Holy Sonnets, insists, finding a new love is not necessarily an expression of callous or predatory self-indulgence. It may equally entail embracing a renewed position of trust and vulnerability. And what is that but turning the other cheek?

Not e s   1 See, for instance, Linda S. Kauffman, Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre, and Epistolary Fictions (Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press, 1986), 29–61; Deborah S. Greenhut, Feminine Rhetorical Culture: Tudor Adaptations of Ovid’s Heroides (NY : Peter Lang, 1988); Elizabeth D. Harvey, Ventriloquized Voices: Feminist Theory and Renaissance Texts (London: Routledge, 1992), 116–39; Helen Moore, “Elizabethan Fiction and Ovid’s Heroides,” Translation and Literature 9.1 (2000): 40–64; Harriette Andreadis, Sappho in Early Modern England: Female Same-Sex Erotics, 1550–1714 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), 27–53; Effrosini Spentzou, Readers and Writers in Ovid’s Heroides: Transgressions of Gender and Genre (Oxford University Press, 2002); Sara H. Lindheim, Male and Female: Epistolary Narrative and Desire in Ovid’s Heroides (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003); Laura Fulkerson, The Ovidian Heroine as Author: Reading, Writing, and Community in the Heroides (Cambridge University Press, 2005); Victoria Rimell, Ovid’s Lovers: Desire, Difference, and the Poetic Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2006); and essays in “The Rhetoric of Complaint: Ovid’s ‘Heroides’

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in the Renaissance and Restoration,” special issue, Renaissance Studies 22 (2008).   2 I follow Valerie Traub in italicizing lesbian to keep in view the modern term’s “epistemological inadequacy, psychological coarseness, and historical contingency” in relation to premodern sexual identity and practice (The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002], 16). Though premodern understandings of “race,” like premodern understandings of gender and sexuality, bear a contingent relation to modern categories, I share Peter Erickson and Kim F. Hall’s view that to dismiss “race” as an anachronism results in “reifying a narrative that makes race the regrettable product of modernity” and thereby relieves premodern scholars of having to think about the racial and racist dimensions of the literature they study (Erickson and Hall, “‘A New Scholarly Song’: Rereading Early Modern Race,” Shakespeare Quarterly 67.1 (2016): 9, 1–13). As Erickson and Hall point out, race is as fluid now as it was in premodern periods. It is therefore unlike lesbian, which has acquired a stable and singular modern definition. I accordingly use the unitalicized term “race” to register the persistence of the concept across different periods not as an unchanging category but as, in Geraldine Heng’s words, “a structural relationship for the articulation and management of human differences, rather than a substantive content” (“The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages I: Race Studies, Modernity, and the Middle Ages,” Literature Compass 8.5 [2011]: 319, 315–31; Heng’s emphasis).   3 Barbara Johnson, “Muteness Envy,” The Barbara Johnson Reader, ed. Melissa Feuerstein, Bill Johnson González, Lili Porten, and Keja Valens (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 215, 200–17; Johnson’s emphasis. Johnson’s own quotations are from Peter Sacks, The English Elegy (Baltimore, M D: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985) and Geoffrey Hartman, “The Voice of the Shuttle: Language from the Point of View of Literature,” The Review of Metaphysics 23.2 (1969): 240–58.   4 Jack Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 1998), 274–5.   5 On the history of Sappho as an emblem for feminist, and especially ­lesbian separatist, values, see Page Du Bois, Sappho Is Burning (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 127–45 and Sappho (London: I.B. Taurus, 2015), 155–73.  6 Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 9.   7 Ibid., 15, 276.   8 Ibid., 276.

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  9 On debates about the authenticity of Ovid’s “Sappho to Phaon,” see Joseph Farrell, “Reading and Writing the Heroides,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 98 (1998): 307–38; on that of Donne’s “Sappho to Philaenis,” see Harvey, Ventriloquized Voices, 119. Robin Robbins, editor of The Complete Poems of John Donne, rev. ed. (London: Longman, 2010) consigns “Sappho to Philaenis” to the category of “Dubia.” 10 Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 46. 11 Ibid., 9. 12 On challenges to a uniformly Western and masculine classicism, particularly as it shapes modern assumptions about gender, see Du Bois, Sappho Is Burning; Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The AfroAsiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, vol. 1 (New Brunswick, N J: Rutgers University Press, 1987); and Ralph J. Hexter, “Sidonian Dido,” in Innovations of Antiquity, ed. Ralph J. Hexter and Daniel L. Selden (New York: Routledge, 1992), 332–84. 13 English quotations are taken from Ovid, Heroides, trans. Harold Isbell (London: Penguin, 1990); this volume does not provide line numbers, so I have cited it by page. Latin quotations are taken from Ovid, Heroides and Amores, trans. Grant Showerman, rev. G.P. Goold (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1977). I have also consulted the most recent translation, Ovid’s Heroides: A New Translation and Critical Essays, trans. Paul Murgatroyd, Bridget Reeves, and Sarah Parker (New York: Routledge, 2017), and George Turberville’s sixteenth-century translation, The heroycall epistles of … Publius Ouidius Naso, in English verse (London: Henry Denham, 1567); quotations from the latter, which does not supply line numbers, will be cited by page. 14 M L. Stapleton, “Edmund Spenser, George Turberville, and Isabella Whitney Read Ovid’s Heroides,” Studies in Philology 105.4 (2008): 497, 487–519. 15 Jane O. Newman, “‘And Let Mild Women to Him Lose Their Mildness’: Philomela, Female Violence, and Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece,” Shakespeare Quarterly 45.3 (1994): 304–26. 16 Paula Blank, “Comparing Sappho to Philaenis: John Donne’s ‘Homopoetics,’” PMLA 110.3 (1995): 358–68. 17 Ben Saunders, Desiring Donne (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 2008), 132. 18 Pamela Gordon, “The Lover’s Voice in Heroides 15: Or, Why Is Sappho a Man?” in Judith P. Hallet and Marylyn B. Skinner, Roman Sexualities (New Brunswick, N J: Princeton University Press, 1997), 274–91; Hallet, “Catullan Voices in Heroides 15: How Sappho Became a Man,” Dictynna: revue de poétique latine 2 (2005): 1–15.

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19 Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 2. For just a few instances of the large body of work on race and masculinity in both premodern and modern ­culture, see Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “On Saracen Enjoyment: Some Fantasies of Race in Late Medieval France and England,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31.1 (2001): 113–46; Arthur J. Little, Shakespeare Jungle Fever (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000); Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); David Eng, Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2001); and Margo Natalie Crawford, Dilution Anxiety and the Black Phallus (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008). 20 Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 272. 21 For discussion of the “Asianizing geography” of Sappho’s poems as well as Sappho’s associations in Roman thought with the East, see du Bois, Sappho Is Burning, 175–94. 22 See Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, N Y: Cornell University Press, 1996), 1–24. 23 Sigmund Freud, “Medusa’s Head,” trans. James Strachey, in Writings on Art and Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 264–6. 24 On colonization as a metaphor for sexual conquest of women in Donne, see for, instance, Harvey, Ventriloquized Voices, 103, and Thomas Docherty, John Donne, Undone (London: Methuen, 1986), 51–87. 25 Kim F. Hall, “‘These Bastard Signs of Fair’: Literary Whiteness in Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” in Post-Colonial Shakespeares, ed. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (London: Routledge, 1998), 64–83. 26 Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 114. See also Evelynn Hammonds, “Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality,” differences 6.2-3 (1994): 126–45; Cathy J. Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” GLQ : A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 3.4 (1997): 437–65. 27 Traub, Renaissance of Lesbianism, esp. 188–227; Mario DiGangi, Sexual Types (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), esp. 63–75. 28 David Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 37, 32–8. Hallet notes that Ovid’s description of Phaon resembles that of “the castrated youth Attis” of Catullus’s Poem 63 (7). On the cinaedus, see John J. Winkler, The Constraints of Desire (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 45–70; Amy Richlin, “Not before Homosexuality: The Materiality of the Cinaedus and the Roman Law against Love between Men” Journal

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of the History of Sexuality 3.4 (April 1993): 523–73; Craig A. Williams, Roman Homosexuality: Ideologies of Masculinity in Classical Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 175–8. 29 Along with Harvey and Andreadis, critics who have understood Donne’s “Sappho to Philaenis” as a misogynist cooptation of lesbian fantasy for masculine pleasure include Bruce Woodcock, “‘Anxious to Amuse’: Metaphysical Poetry and the Discourse of Renaissance Masculinity,” in Writing and the English Renaissance, ed. William Zunder and Suzanne Trill (London: Longman, 1996), 51–68; and Ronald Corthell, Ideology and Desire in Renaissance Poetry (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 70–4. Critics who have read Donne’s poem as sympathetic to lesbian love include Blank, “Comparing Sappho”; Janel Mueller, “Troping Utopia: Donne’s Brief for Lesbianism,” in Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images, ed. James Grantham Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 182–207; and Barbara Correll, “Symbolic Economies and Zero-Sum Erotics: Donne’s ‘Sappho to Philaenis,” ELH 62.3 (1995): 487–507. Ben Saunders, Catherine Bates, and Constance M. Furey all see the poem as a meditation on the problems of difference and mutuality, regardless of the gender of lovers; see Saunders, Desiring Donne, 139–42, Catherine Bates, Masculinity, Gender, and Identity in the English Renaissance Lyric (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 216–58, and Constance M. Furey, Poetic Relations: Intimacy and Faith in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 108–10. 30 Traub, Renaissance of Lesbianism, 276–325. Mueller, Andreadis, Bates, and Saunders all assume that lesbian love is based on mutual affection and equal status; I am arguing that Donne and Ovid imagine models of female desire that challenge absolute associations of femininity with nurturing egalitarianism and masculinity with violent domination. 31 The OED is quite coy on this point, but the English “lip” was used to signify female “labia” at least by the late sixteenth-century: in A dictionarie of the French and English tongues, Randle Cotgrave refers to “Landies, the two Pterigones, or great wings within the lips of a woman’s Priuities” (London, 1611). The uncertainty as to whether tribades rubbed or ­penetrated other women, DiGangi has shown, inhered in premodern ­representations of the tribade as “masculine woman” (Sexual Types, 66). 32 Translation from The Lesbian Pillow Book, ed. Alison Hennegan (London: Fourth Estate, 2000). Harvey and Andreadis both see Martial’s descriptions of Philaenis as evidence of Roman misogyny (Harvey, Ventriloquized Voices, 125–6; Andreadis, Sappho in Early Modern

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England, 43-7). Don Cameron Allen argued a long time ago that Donne follows sixteenth-century commentators on Martial in compounding Philaenis from a range of girls of that name (Philaenis is the feminine ­version of “Beloved”) in classical literature; see “Donne’s ‘Sappho to Philaenis,’” ELN 1 (March 1964): 188–91. 33 On this shift, see Mathew Kuefler, The Manly Eunuch: Masculinity, Gender Ambiguity, and Christ in Late Antiquity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). For a queer reading of penetrable masculinity, see Richard Rambuss, Closet Devotions (Duke Durham, NC : University Press, 1998). 34 Rambuss, Closet Devotions, 11–71.

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P art T h r e e Maturation of Youth

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8 “Of Youth and Age”: Ovid and Generational Masculinities in Ben Jonson’s Poetaster (1602) Liz Oakley-Brown

A G e n e r at io n a l Approach to O v id a n d Masculi ni ty That Renaissance England thought masculinity generational is witnessed in canonical works from the period. Jaques famous speech in As You Like It (c.1599), for instance, shows how “one man in his time plays many parts, / His actes being seven ages” (II.vii.141-2). According to Bruce R. Smith, “early modern men and women had their own typologies for understanding how masculine identity is achieved, maintained, and sometimes lost across time … there were four such conceptions current in ancient, medieval and early modern thought: one based on Ptolemaic astrology, one on Aristotelian biology, one on Galenic medicine, and one on Christian theology.”1 By dividing a man’s life into “seven ages,” Jaques is “speaking for a typology” generally based on Ptolemaic astrology in which each age corresponds to one of the seven planets orbiting the earth.2 Francis Bacon’s later essay, “Of Youth and Age” (1625), as its title suggests, forges a different comparative analysis of manhood. It begins, “Generally, youth is like the first cogitations, not so wise as the second. For there is youth in thoughts as well as in ages. And yet the invention of young men, is more lively, than that of old; and Imaginations streame into their minds better, and as it were more divinely.”3 By contrast with the Shakespearean comedy’s use of corporeal images to represent the shift from “the infant / Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms” to

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“second childishness ... Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything” (II.vii.142-65), Bacon’s prose provides classical and contemporaneous exempla to support his largely Galenic meditation on young and older men’s temperaments. Bacon’s “Of Youth and Age” invokes three specific Romans’ lives at the outset: Julius Caesar and Septimus Severus show how “Natures that have much heat, and great and violent desires and perturbations, are not ripe for action until they have passed the meridian of their years”; Augustus Caesar illustrates the means by which “reposed natures may do well in youth” (187). In what follows, I consider related notions of generational masculinities in a text written by one of Bacon’s “illustrious companions,”4 Ben Jonson’s Poetaster or The Arraignment (first performed in 1601 and first published in 1602).5 The play’s period of production falls between Shakespeare’s comedy and Bacon’s essay, and takes its creative impetus from the lives of Roman poets (chiefly Ovid, Virgil, and Horace). With its provocative opening line, “Of shapes transformde to bodies straunge I purpose to entreat,”6 Ovid’s Metamorphoses is obviously invested in somatic instability while other Ovidian writings such as Heroides, Tristia, Ars amatoria, Remedia amoris, and Fasti explore abandoned, exiled, enamoured, and ritualised masculinities. My essay argues that as a work markedly produced for boy actors, Poetaster or The Arraignment encourages the scrutiny of male bodies and age, not least in its Baconian-like comparison of the youthful Ovid with other Roman luminaries.7

R e a d in g Poetaster Featuring the well-known exile of the accomplished Roman writer and the physical purgation of a fictional counterpart – the titular Poetaster otherwise known as Crispinus – Jonson’s plot is primarily about male authorship in absolutist cultures such as Augustan Rome and Elizabethan England: “Poetaster is clearly about the role of the poet in society, but it is also about (among other things) the corrosive power of envy and detraction, about language, its use and abuse, its struggle, for Jonson, towards singleness of meaning, and its disturbing tendency to fracture into multiple meanings … it is a play about authority, … but also here of the prince, whose responsible authority both sanctions and is sanctioned by the poet, and replaces the false authority of Ovid’s father, of Tucca over his pages, of Lupus in his

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office as tribune.”8 While many scholars comprehensively discuss the ways in which Poetaster chimes with Jonson’s own experience as a jobbing sixteenth-century playwright, Tom Cain’s neat summary suggests that an author’s professional success is tied to an ability to manage the inevitable slipperiness of language and not to be managed by it. Both the quarto’s and the 1616’s folio’s “Ad Lectorem” [To the Reader] takes the form of a quotation from Martial which hints at linguistic vicissitude and the problems of communication: Ludimus innocuis verbis, hoc iuro potentis Per Genium Fame, Castalidumque gregem: Perque tuas aures, magni mihi numinis instar, Lector, inhumana liber ab Invidia. Mart. We play with harmless words: I swear by the genius of mighty Fame, and the Castilian choir, and by your ears, which are to me like a great deity, reader, free from churlish envy.9 As is commonly known, the early part of Jonson’s own career is characterized by related concerns. In 1597 (when Jonson was twentyfive), The Isle of Dogs, his play co-written with Thomas Nashe, led to Jonson’s imprisonment.10 Ian Donaldson explains that “On 28 July the privy council, in apparent response to its performance, ordered the closure of all the London theatres because of the ‘greate disorders’ caused ‘by lewd matters that are handled on the stages, and by resorte and confluence of bad people.’ Jonson and two of his fellow actors, Gabriel Spencer and Robert Shaa, were arrested and imprisoned at the instigation of Elizabeth’s interrogator, the notorious Richard Topcliffe, and charged at Greenwich on 15 August with ‘Leude and mutynous behaviour.”11 The exact details of these “lewd matters” are unknown. In a similar vein, Poetaster’s quarto concludes with a note “To the Reader” stating that “in place of the Epilogue, was meant to be an Apology from the Author” but it is missing because “he is restrain’d by Authoritie.” As we shall see below, Poetaster’s folio edition eventually prints this apparently censured material as a critically reflective “Apologetical Dialogue.” The specific cause of Jonson’s offence is unclear. However, as the play was “written for a Chapel performance before the Queen”12 in a period which coincided with

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Jonson’s conversion to Catholicism, the Essex Rebellion, and Robert Devereux’s arraignment, there are potentially all kind of problematic allusions at stake.13 In any case, allied discourses interrogating poets’ public reputations pulse through a Jonsonian Rome comprised of not only consummate and aspirant writers but also other urban dwellers such as a lawyer, an apothecary, a goldsmith, an actor, a singer, a soldier, and powerful would-be patrons. Poetaster features two central roles for women: Augustus’s daughter Julia, and Chloe, the wife of the cuckolded goldsmith. Julia and Chloe orbit Ovid-the-poet and Crispinus-the-poetaster as muse and potential consumer (in many senses) respectively, thus amplifying the homosocial writing networks depicted in Poetaster and its author’s own context.14 While Poetaster is not exclusively about Ovid, Jonson exploits the lacuna in the classical poet’s well-known yet enigmatic expulsion as a cipher for “the corrosive power of envy and detraction, about language, its use and abuse.”15 The Mystery of Ovid’s Exile (to recall the title John C. Thibault’s 1964 classic study) is that it is only referred to as “carmen et error” [a poem and a mistake] in Ovid’s own account in the Tristia.16 The Ovidian text in question is often thought to be Ars amatoria; the mistake “remains unknowable.”17 George Sandys’s “The Life of Ovid,” one of the prefaces accompanying his encyclopaedic 1632 translation of the Metamorphoses, provides a useful summary of Stuart England’s opinions about Ovid’s banishment from Rome: But in this eueryway happy condition, when his age required ease, and now about to imploy his beloued vacancie in the reuiew and polishing of his former labours, he was banished, or rather confined to Tomos (a citie of Sarmatia bordering on the Euxine Sea) by A ugust us C a e sar, on the fourth of the Ides of December, and in the one and fiftieth yeere of his age, to the ­generall griefe of his friends and acquaintance: (¶1v) Here, Sandys’s interest in the disparity between Ovid’s age which “required ease” and the discomfitures of forced exile seem coterminous with Bacon’s attempts to separate a man’s life into humoral paradigms. And when Sandys draws attention to the various suppositions for the poet’s exile, Ovid’s age comes into view again: The cause of this his so cruell and deplored exile, is rather coniectured then certainely knowne. Most agree that it was far his

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too much familiarity with J ul i a the daughter of Au g u s t u s , masked under the name of C o r i n n a. Others that hee had unfortunately seene the incest of Cae sar: which may be insinuated, in that he complaines of his error, and compares himselfe to A c teo n. But the pretended occasion was for his composing of the Art of Love, as intollerably lasciuious and corrupting good manners. A, pretence I may call it, since vnlikely it is, that hee should banish him in his age for what hee writ when hardly a man, and after so long a conniuance. (¶1v) If Sandys reminds his seventeenth-century reader of Ovid’s timeline and the disparities between youthful and older selves, Jonson’s Elizabethan Poetaster makes that juxtaposition the very crux of its narrative.18 As Colin Burrow puts it, “the first major literary representation of the moment of Ovid’s exile in England was Ben Jonson’s Poetaster in 1601”19 and the playwright dramatises the exilic episode as one resting on Ovid’s youthful relationship with the socially superior Julia combined with an impersonation of Jupiter at a costumed banquet. It is worth pausing on the moment in Act IV scene v in which the play’s young writers and their circle dress up as Roman deities. In this present discussion of Ovid, masculinity, and age it is noteworthy that poet and poetaster (Ovid and Crispinus) take on the garb of gods corresponding to apt models from Ptolemy’s astrological scheme: Ovid’s Jupiter is aligned with manhood while Crispinus is Mercury, the god affiliated with childhood. In addition, it is telling that Ovidas-Jupiter starts the episode by instructing Crispinus-as-Mercury to “command silence” (IV.v.3).20 Yet, Ovid’s dominance is short-lived and his presumption incites Augustus’s wrath: Licentious Naso, for thy violent wrong In soothing the declined affections Of our base daughter, we exile thy feet From all approach to our imperial court On pain of death; and thy misbegotten love Commit to patronage of iron doors, Since her soft-hearted sire cannot contain her. (IV.vi.52-8) Chronicles concerning the emperor’s career made much of his own youthful success. Accordingly in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (1599),

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Augustus is dramatized as the “young Octavius” (III.i.299), while the 1603 edition of Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives included the “newly added” appraisal of Octavius Caesar which exalted “Thy youth Augustus.”21 Jonson’s metatheatrical depiction of Ovid’s banishment is thus a discursive site of manhood, age, and power. Early sixteenth-century humanists such as Juan Luis Vives warned women against reading Ovid. As Richard Hyrd’s 1529 English translation of Vives’ Instruction of a Christen Woma[n]states, “In my mynde no man was euer banysshed more rightfully tha[n] was Ouide / at lest wise if he was banished for writing the crafte of loue.”22 Echoing the archetypal defamation of the Roman poet as “Licentious Naso,” Jonson’s Augustus is inscribed with the kind of authority bestowed by mature political and paternal dominance. Following a long and emotional farewell with Julia, Ovid’s final onstage appearance comes at the end of act IV when, “mad with love” (IV.x.99), he chides himself thus: Vain Ovid! Kneel not to the place, nor air. She’s in thy heart: rise then, and worship there. The truest wisdom silly men can have Is dotage on the follies of their flesh. (IV.x.105-9) Ovid’s impassioned exit demands attention, not least in his last line which brings “dotage” into view. On the one hand, Jonson’s character conveys commonplace neo-Platonic attitudes which privilege mind over body. On the other hand, young Ovid’s epigrammatic appraisal of his former fleshy “follies” in terms of “silly men” and “dotage,” a word which can mean “intellect impaired … through old age” (OED 2a),23 is suggestive. Though Ovid’s enforced departure may be symptomatic of a temporal rite of passage24 – he leaves Rome and his youth behind – the poet’s last words in Poetaster might equally comment on the nature of Renaissance masculine identity itself. Ovid’s withdrawal in the penultimate rather than the closing act has had a significant bearing on the character’s – and the play’s – critical reception. For many scholars, Poetaster’s treatment of Ovid ultimately defines the play as a neoclassical one bespeaking an “Augustan idea.”25 Hence, the departure of Ovid and his works of “sensuality and immediate experience” combined with Virgil’s arrival at court

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“out of Campania” in V.i.72 with a manuscript of the Aeneid which he gives to Augustus (V.ii.17) allows “cerebral and learned [Virgilian] poetry”26 to end the play while supporting perceptions of Jonson as a maturing writer himself. One of the most enduring ways of considering Poetaster27 is via its engagement with the so-called War of the Theatres (or Poetomachia [Poet’s War] as Thomas Dekker describes it),28 an invective mode “played out on and off the stage from 1599 to around 1601” and inscribed in texts such as Historiomastix (John Marston 1599), Every Man out of His Humour (Ben Jonson 1599), Satiromastix (Dekker 1601), and Poetaster.29 In this kind of analysis, Poetaster’s plot encompassing three renowned poets of Augustan Rome alongside Crispinus and other versifiers (Tibullus, Gallus, Propertius) becomes an allegory for the altercation between the aforementioned Elizabethan writers (all of whom were under the age of thirty at the time of the quarto’s publication).30 As with critical discussions of Poetaster’s general interest in scenes of writing, such interpretations inevitably read the author into the work itself: “Jonson, in a piece of extreme self-fashioning, modeled himself on Horace, both in personality (as he understood it) and poetic method. Jonson announces this without subtlety in his play the Poetaster, where, in imitation of the Sermones of Horace, he presents Horace (obviously a substitution for himself) as a virtuous poet who responds with dignity to the schemes directed against him by the enemies of poetry who are themselves subjected to ridicule and punishment in the play.”31 Furthermore, the reviewer of a rare twentieth-century performance understands Jonson’s Virgil as Shakespeare.32 However, Ovid’s ambiguous personae as either the classical poet who laid the foundations for early modern moralized renditions of the Metamorphoses or the exiled writer who set the tone for erotic verse sits uneasily in this hermeneutic paradigm. In the words of M.L. Stapleton, “The role of Ovid in the play signifies an entirely different matter” and he goes on to explain how “Commentators have read this infrequently appearing yet key figure as a surrogate for the outmoded 1590s poetical dispensation, an amalgam of the sonneteers and writers of erotic epyllia in the sixteenth century. Most have wisely refrained from making correspondences between this jovial, romantic young Naso and any specific contemporary, though Marston, Donne, and Shakespeare have been unconvincingly proposed.”33 But what is “young Naso’s” role in Poetaster? A clue might be in that very adjective, “young.”

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We have already seen how Ovid exits the play. It is important, then, that Poetaster opens with the lone figure of Ovid declaiming: Then, when this body falls in funeral fire, My name shall live, and bent my best part aspire. It shall go so. [Writes] (I.i.1-3) This ventriloquisation of “the final lines of Amores I.xv as translated by Marlowe”34 and “slightly modifie[d]” by Jonson35 sets up a shrewd vignette encouraging a comparison between classical and Elizabethan masculine identity. In this short soliloquy, several scholars recognize the fusion of the exiled Augustan’s backstory with the 1599 censorship of Marlowe’s Amores, but with sundry effects. For Howard Erskine-Hill, “the deliberate recall of Marlowe in the opening poetry of Ovid” shows how Jonson “built his play out of many Elizabethan materials, as well out of situations, characters and poems which were specifically Augustan … By the opening of Act V the play is depicting a polity from which Ovidian/Marlovian writing has been banished.”36 Cain, for example, later suggests that Poetaster’s “opening” is a “graceful if double-edged tribute to Marlowe”37 while Stapleton argues that “Jonson understands Ovid as a Marlovian poet, and he either echoes or alludes to his predecessor’s works repeatedly in the play.”38 Somewhat differently, Carr stresses Ovid’s significance as a type of phenomenology before the letter: “Ovid and his poetry engage Jonson’s careful attention as much as do the works of Horace and Vergil. Ovid is a sensualist to be sure, but not necessarily in a pejorative sense. His refusal to trust an abstract world beyond the senses is a philosophic position and not per se a moral aberration although like all convictions it has moral pitfalls.”39 While all of these cogent observations extend the play’s allegorical parameters, and Carr’s goes some way to emphasising the young poet’s significance, Stapleton’s remark that there has been “relatively modest critical interest in the play’s representation of Ovid”40 generally still stands.41 Yet Poetaster’s fulsome dramatization of Ovid has more to say about Renaissance masculine selfhoods than antagonistic struggles between playwrights. In some ways, Poetaster has become archetypal of the “tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture” that Roland Barthes once heralded as “The Death of the Author.”42 But rather than

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signalling the author’s demise, Jonson’s post-Poetomachic profile generally results in the kind of figure that a Barthesian analysis might perceive as an “Author God”43: a writer with the ultimate authority over their inscriptions. Though modern scholars contribute to that specific kind of Jonsonian persona – Sara Van den Berg, for example, explains that “Jonson was the first Englishman to earn his living as a writer, exploiting every form of the literary medium to address private, public, and courtly audiences”44 – to a large extent Jonson manufactured that authorial status himself. The “Apologetical Dialogue” appended to the folio’s edition responds “to sundry impotent libels then cast out (and some yet remaining) against me and this play (“To The Reader”) in a sketch comprising three ‘Persons,’” two critics called Nasutus and Polyposus who visit Author in the wake of Poetaster’s performance. The opening discussion between Nasutus and Polyposus (lines 1-9) gives way to their spying on “Author in his study” (s.d.10) before the critics “discover themselves” (s.d.26). The ensuing action involves a discussion between the critics and the playwright in which the Author defends his work from accusations that Poetaster took to task “The law and lawyers, captains, and the players / By their particular names” (68-9). In a lengthy rejoinder, Author explains how he chose Augustus Caesar’s times To show that Virgil, Horace, and the rest, Of those great master spirits did not want Detractors then, or practisers against them. (88-92) He then rejects the “former calumnies … mentioned” by Nasutus and Polyposus one by one. While “captains” and “players” are swiftly despatched, “law and lawyers” receive a more detailed consideration: First, of the law; indeed, I brought in Ovid, Chid by his angry father for neglecting The study of their laws for poetry; And I am warranted by his own words: Saepe pater dixit, studium quid inutile tentas? Maeonides nullas ipse reliquit opes. And in far harsher terms elsewhere, as these: Non me verbosas leges ediscere, non me Ingrato voces prostituisse foro.

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But how this should relate unto our laws Or their just ministers with least abuse, I reverence both too much to understand! (103-14) Using textual evidence first from Ovid’s Tristia 4.10.21-2 and then from Amores 1.15.5-6, Jonson reflects on how the Roman poet – not Jonson – rejects the importance of legal endeavours.45 Even so, Jonson works hard to emphasize his authorial role and his textual innovations have become markers for the play-text’s elevated status. David Bevington comments that “A notably literary characteristic” of Poetaster’s quarto is Jonson’s marginal indication of his classical sources”46 and (after Cain) he advances the play’s bookish profile by observing how these marginalia are a “new feature not only in Jonson but seemingly in plays published in English since the invention of printing. [The quarto] initiates the practice, with citations of Ovid at 1.1.37-8, Horace at 3.1.1, and Virgil at 5.2.56-97.”47 Poetaster’s first appearance in print, Bevington continues, “suggests a desire on Jonson’s part to affirm the literary status of his texts and to distance them from stage practice, as he was to do systematically in preparing his texts for the 1616 folio.”48 While Jonson’s reputation often rests on his “studiously literary bent,”49 drama’s perilous bifurcated semiotics – its wide-ranging use of verbal and non-verbal gestures beyond the author’s control – opens up critical discussions beyond authorial intent and control. Indeed, a comparison of the quarto’s 1602 title Poetaster or The Arraignment with the edition that appeared in the 1616 folio (“The” is replaced with “His” and now includes the phrase “A Comical Satire”)50 shows how the Elizabethan text is less specific about the play’s focus and genre that the later edition. In many ways, the Elizabethan iteration of Poetaster or The Arraignment is a far more interrogative dramatic enterprise.

P e r f o r m in g Poetaster As Evelyn Tribble remarks, “Then as now the vocabulary in which skilled action is discussed can be maddeningly vague, as the arts of the body seem to evade the limitations of written language.”51 In the case of Poetaster, these limitations are exacerbated. Echoing Bruce R. Smith, Bart Van Es points out that “In the early modern imagination, masculinity was not only constructed in contrast to femininity

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but also in contrast to boyhood and old age,”52 With both Smith’s and Van Es’s points in mind, the fact that Poetaster is a boys’ company play is an important aspect of its dramaturgical fabric but one which – thus far – is mostly lost. Cain’s brief 1995 discussion of children’s companies observes that “It is clear that boy actors must have added to the impact of the comic caricature, but in other respects a performance acted entirely by boys is difficult to recreate in the imagination.”53 If Cain’s analysis had been produced just a decade later, Edward’s Boys’ staging of “rarely-seen plays originally written for the Early Modern boys’ companies” might have helped both the editor and his readers reflect further on Jonson’s work, which was “acted in the Blacke Friers, by the children of her Majesties Chappell.”54 The play’s general performance history is extremely limited and, to date, Edward’s Boys have not staged a full production of Poetaster. However, the dvd recording of June 2018’s showcase When Paul’s Boys Met Edward’s Boys includes the so-called “balcony scene” from act IV, comprising scenes ix-x.,55 Ovid’s final appearance in Jonson’s play. Reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (and perhaps deliberately so),56 the episode begins with Ovid’s thirty-line soliloquy which sums up Rome’s power structure: Banished the Court? Let me be banished life, Since the chief end of life is there concluded: Within the court is all the kingdom bounded, And as her sacred sphere doth comprehend Ten thousand times so much, as so much place In any part of all the empire else; […] The court’s the abstract of all Rome’s desert, And my dear Julia th’ abstract of the court. (IV.ix. 1-19) When taken out of context from the folio’s “Comical Satire” as a whole, there is no sense of the “burlesque farewell” that Victoria Moul describes.57 Once Julia enters above, the actors deliver an articulate and sincere rendition of enforced separation. Rather than inviting the audience into a parodic episode, Edward’s Boys enact earnest heteronormative desire. In their dramatization of a young couple separated by patriarchal authority, the boy actors’ roles are not so far removed from their own ages. Their dramatic skills might be more

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visible in portrayals of older characters, and it is worth remembering that Solomon Pavey (c.1588–1602), a member of Poetaster’s original company,58 was memorialized by Jonson in his twenty-four line “Epitaph for S.P.” as one who “did act (what now we mone) / Old men so duely.” There is no way of knowing which part he took in Poetaster but in commenting on Pavey in this way, Jonson recalls an individual boy actor’s talents while tacitly recalling a variegated group whose ages ranged “between ten and fourteen.”59 Given the scarcity of Poetaster’s performances, it is not surprising that scholarly interest in has ranged over questions of textuality and authorship rather than the play’s dramaturgy. Of course, there are important studies of early modern material culture and the recruitment of boy players by way of kidnapping,60 the “domineering training tactics” used by the company masters61 and the dynamics of desire which look to “the boy beneath.”62 My intention is not to disregard these significant analyses of sixteenth-century children’s companies. Instead, by taking notice of the quarto’s list headed “The Persons That Act” instead of the folio’s catalogue of “The Persons of the Play” (1616, 274),63 I want to suggest that Poetaster’s initial appearance in print gives greater onstage agency to the “children of her Majesties Chappell” than the folio’s emphasis on Jonson’s Workes.64 In other words, the quarto is more invested in what Evelyn Tribble has described as “the kinesic intelligence of the early modern actor.”65 However, and as we have already seen, the nature of that agency is hard to discern. Lucy Munro’s important book on the Children of the Queen’s Revels: A Jacobean Theatre Repertory obviously focuses on the period succeeding Poetaster’s. Still, Munro seemingly takes up and develops Cain’s earlier reservations about twentieth-century readings of Elizabethan children’s companies. The “appeal” of the children’s companies, she argues “is perhaps particularly difficult for modern readers to grasp, more difficult than even that of the conventional performance of women’s parts by boys or young men in the adult companies.”66 Munro points out that while plays such as Cynthia’s Revels (1600) “explicitly refer to the bodies of the adolescent actors,”67 there are no other material signs of dramaturgical difference between children and adult companies. With a performance date which just anticipates Poetaster’s, Cynthia’s Revels (1600) shows Jonson’s apparently “uncharacteristic recourse to Ovidian subjects” in order to portray “the transgressive bodily practices of unauthorised courtiers.”68 When compared to this slightly earlier play, there is something less obviously Ovidian about Poetaster’s approach to early

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modern masculinity. Nonetheless, Jonson’s embodiment of the youthful Roman author makes a theatrical spectacle out of a distinctly Ovidian ­masculinity in different ways and before the main plot begins. Poetaster’s Induction takes the form of two substantial speeches. The first, a tour-de-force protestation about the ensuing play spliced with an energetic provocation of the audience, is delivered by Envy (1-61).69 Having glanced at a copy of Jonson’s work (here referred to as “Th’ Arraignment” rather than Poetaster [3]) and explaining that the play “will be subject for my snakes and me” (5), Envy addresses the playgoers: The shine Of this assembly here offends my sight; I’ll darken that first, and out-face their grace. Wonder not if I stare: these fifteen weeks (So long as since the plot was but an embrion) Have I with burning lights mixed vigilant thoughts In expectation of this hated play, To which, at last, I am arrived as Prologue. Nor would I you should look for other looks, Gesture or compliment from me than what The infected bulk of Envy can afford. (11-21) The Blackfriars theatre’s “wealthy, predominantly, male clientele”70 which frequented its “fashion conscious location adjacent to two of the Inns of Court, the Inner and Middle Temple”71 is upheld by Envy’s metatheatrical exclamation about the “Shine / Of this assembly” and the soliloquy’s broad emphasis on classical erudition.72 In general, and as Cain observes,73 the Prologue’s personification of this malignant passion echoes Ovid’s “ekphrastic model”74 in the Metamorphoses 2:760-809.75 Certainly, Jonson’s Envy might resonate very well with those educated theatregoers who had encountered the Latin poem, a mainstay of Elizabethan England’s humanist agenda,76 as grammar schoolboys before the onset of their legal careers. In Golding’s translation, Envy’s dwelling chimes with the figure’s “infected bulk.” She lives in: a foule and irksome caue Replete with blacke and lothly filth and stinking like a graue. It standeth in a hollow dale where neyther light of Sunne

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Nor blast of any winde or Ayre may for the deepenesse come. A dreayrie sad and dolefull den ay full of slouthfull colde As which ay dimd with smoldring smoke, doth never fire beholde. … Her lippes were pale, her cheekes were wan, and all her face was swart; Her bodie leane as any Rake. She looked eke askew. Her teeth were fured with filth and drosse, her gums were ­waryish blew. The working of her festered gall had made hir stomacke greene. … Such poyson also every where ungraciously she sheads That every Cottage where she comes and every Towne and Citie Doe take infection at hir breath.77 Given the reformed Protestant framework of Golding’s moralized Ovid, it is hardly surprising that Envy’s deleterious attributes, from her external environment to her internal organs, are augmented. Indeed, the translation’s ideologies enmeshed with humoral imbalance produce an exaggerated misogyny. By contrast, the quarto’s quibbling characteristics discussed above – the ambiguity surrounding the play’s title and its unspecified genre – stretch into the gender politics of Jonson’s Envy. In Ovid, as Golding’s rendition makes clear, and “In the emblem books, Envy is depicted as a woman with pallid visage, wasted body, oblique gaze, surrounded by snakes.”78 However, instead of the female form Invidia, the quarto uses the masculine Livor (see figure 8.1) to describe the Jonsonian character.79 Furthermore, Poetaster’s Livor is far removed from the gnawing creature that moves “slouthfully… / With lumpish leysure like a Snayle,” “mumble[ing] with hirselfe” and “sighing day and night.”80 Jonson’s Envy is eloquent and, as exemplified in these captivating extracts, exudes rhetorical and physical vibrancy in communication with both its onstage and offstage subjects: Cling to my neck and wrists, my loving worms, And cast you round in soft and amorous folds Till I do bid uncurl: then break your knots, Shoot out yourselves at length, as your forced stings Would hide themselves within his malice sides To whom I shall apply you. …

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For I am ris here with a covetous hope, To blast your pleasures and destroy your sports With wrestings, comments, applications, Spy-like suggestions, privy whisperings, And thousand such promoting sleights as these. (5-27) Speaking of his overarching dramaturgical approach, Evelyn Tribble observes that “it is Ben Jonson who, much more than Shakespeare, is keenly interested in in the minutiae of bodily gestures and gaits. Few playwrights hold the body up to scrutiny in quite the same way Jonson does.”81 Though Tribble does not discuss Poetaster in this context, that play’s engagement with Invidia, Ovid, and generational masculinity are equally suited to her description. There is nothing in the quarto’s text which proves that Jonson’s Livor is masculine; it is only in performance that such an engendering could be confirmed. Nonetheless, it is tempting to consider how prudent it might be to present Envy as a youthful boy under Elizabethan rule. If thus portrayed by a diminutive actor of “her Majesties Chappell,” Livor’s aggressive suppression by “An arméd Prologue” (so dressed because “’tis a dangerous age” [67]), conveys an antagonistic and profoundly homosocial interaction befitting Poetaster’s plot at large: the removal of a youthful, masculine, Ovidian poetic presence. While this is a speculative analysis, it is the case that Poetaster begins by underlining Jonson’s idiosyncratic treatment of Ovid’s age upon exile. Once the opening scene of Ovid’s authorship is set, the poet’s societal position is established with the household’s attendant Luscus calling “Young master! Master Ovid, do you hear?” (I.i.4). This early onstage interaction helps to cultivate the tension between Ovids junior/senior, son/ father, youth/ age in hierarchical binary manoeuvres which mimic the relationship between senex and puer in classical forms.82 Markedly, the inaugural encounter between young Ovid and his servant sets up an intergenerational conflict which extends to Ovid’s final encounter with Augustus himself.

C o n c l u s io n : O v id , Youth and Age Valerie Traub has identified a predominantly masculine “early modern ‘culture of Ovid’” which is contingent to specific spatial and temporal locations: “the pedagogy of the schoolroom, the literary one-upmanship at the Inns of Court, the commercial milieu of the theatre, and

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Figure 8.1  ©The British Library Board. Ben Jonson’s Poetaster, or, the Arraignment (1602). Shelf mark 644.b.52. A1r-v.

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scenes of public and private reading.”83 Poetaster’s use of texts produced by writers known through grammar-school education, a plot concerned with Ovid’s rejection of his legal studies and the consequences of his actions, its “Apologetical Dialogue’s” reflection on post-performance criticism, and the play’s depiction of public and private textual production clearly correspond to Traub’s four discourses of “Ovidian culture”: education, law, performance, and publishing. In its particular staging and ultimate preservation of a “young Naso,” and as this essay has shown, Jonson’s 1602 Poetaster written for the “children of her Majesties Chappell,” it is also inscribed with contemporaneous concerns for those generational masculinities “Of Youth and Age.”

Not e s   I would like to thank James Loxley and Eleanor Rycroft for sharing their knowledge of Poetaster and boy companies with me, and Eoin Price for generously sending me a prepublication copy of his article on the children of the Chapel Repertory (2018). I am also extremely grateful to this volume’s editors and its anonymous reviewers for their cogent suggestions on earlier drafts of my essay.   1 Bruce R. Smith, Shakespeare and Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 71–2.   2 Ibid., 72.   3 All quotations from Shakespeare are taken from The Norton Shakespeare, 2nd ed., ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean Howard, and Katharine Eiseman Maus (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008). Bacon’s essay was originally published in the third edition of his The Essayes or Counsels, civill and morall (London, 1625). All quotations are from Francis Bacon, Francis Bacon: The Essays, ed. John Pitcher (London: Penguin, 1985).   4 Robert Appelbaum, “Food,” Ben Jonson in Context, ed. Julie Sanders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 314, 314–21. According to John Pitcher, “The poet Ben Jonson, not an easy man to please, declared that no one ever spoke ‘more neatly, more pressly [precisely], more weightily, or suffered less emptiness, less idleness’ in his speech than Bacon.” See Pitcher, ed. Bacon, The Essays, 23.   5 The description of Poetaster as “A Comicall Satyre” was added to the play’s title page in the 1616 folio of The Workes of Benjamin Jonson. As Tom Cain records, “Poetaster, or The Arraignment was entered in the

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Stationers’ Register on 21 December 1601 by Matthew Lownes as ‘A booke called Poetaster or his arrainement.’” In his critical edition, Ben Jonson: Poetaster (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 277.   6 Arthur Golding, The. xv. bookes of P. Ovidius Naso, entytuled Metamorphosis, translated oute of Latin into English meter. (London, 1567), B1r.   7 For a related discussion of “Epicoene’s overall commitment to the ­opposition between youth and old age,” see Bruce Boehrer, “The Classical Context of Ben Jonson’s ‘Other Youth,’” SEL : Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 43.2 (Spring 2003): 442, 439–58.  8 Cain, Ben Jonson, 4–5.   9 Ibid., trans. Cain, 68. 10 Joan Carr observes that “Jonson makes [Ovid] in Poetaster a young poet like himself and one whose ‘crime’ of love is thus all the more pardonable.” See “Jonson and the Classics: The Ovid-Plot in Poetaster,” English Literary Renaissance 8.3 (1978): 298, 296–311. 11 Ian Donaldson, “Jonson, Benjamin [Ben] (1572–1637),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online, Oxford University, accessed 9 December 2019, https://www.xofroddnb.com.ezproxy.lancs.ac.uk/view/ article/15116; para. 9. 12 Jeanne H. McCarthy, “Ben Jonson and the Boy Company Tradition,” Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies 3.1 (Spring/Summer 2003): 17, 1–49. 13 On Poetaster’s relationship to the Essex Rebellion, see Tom Cain, ‘“Satyres, That Girde and Fart at the Time’: Poetaster and the Essex Rebellion,” in Refashioning Ben Jonson: Gender, Politics, and the Jonsonian Canon, ed. Julie Sanders, Kate Chedgzoy, and Susan Wiseman (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), 48–70. 14 The introduction to Refashioning Ben Jonson argues that “Outside the context of heterosexuality – and more particularly the manoeuvrings around marriage and cuckoldry which are the staple of certain forms of comic drama – Jonson’s plays, prior to his Caroline drama at least, demonstrate almost no interest in female sexuality” (20). 15 Cain, Ben Jonson, 4. Arthur L. Wheeler explains that “Biographies of Ovid began to appear in the Middle Ages and became more and more numerous during and after the Renaissance until they culminated in the very careful and erudite Vita of ninety quarto pages by John Masson early in the eighteenth century.” “Topics from the Life of Ovid,” The American Journal of Philology 46.1 (1925): 1, 1–28. See also Joseph A. Dane, “The Ovids of Ben Jonson in Poetaster and in Epicoene,” Comparative Drama 13.3 (1978): 224, 222–34.

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16 John C. Thibault, The Mystery of Ovid’s Exile (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964). Ovid, Tristia. Ex Ponto, trans. Arthur L. Wheeler, rev. G.P. Goold (Cambridge, M A: Harvard University Press, 1924), 2.2.207. 17 Sara K. Myers, “Ovid.” Oxford Bibliographies Online, para 2, accessed 9 December 2019, http://www.oxfordbibliographiesonline.com/view/ document/obo-9780195389661/obo-9780195389661-0039.xml. 18 George Sandys’s text is quoted from his Ovid’s Metamorphosis Englished. Mythologized and Represented in Figures (London, 1632). 19 Coin Burrow, “Re-embodying Ovid: Renaissance Afterlives,” The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, ed. Philip Hardie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 309. 20 All quotations are from Cain, Ben Jonson. 21 Thomas North, trans., The lives of the noble Grecians and Romaines … Hereunto are also added the lives of Epaminondas, of Philip of Macedon, of Dionysius the elder, tyrant of Sicilia, of Augustus Caesar, of Plutarke, and of Seneca: with the lives of nine other excellent chieftaines of warre: collected out of AEmilius Probus, by S.G. S. (London: Richard Field, 1603), 51. 22 Richard Hyrd, trans,. A very fruitefull and pleasant booke called the Instructio[n] of a Christen woma[n] (London: Thomas Berthelet, 1529), Biiv. 23 Bruce R. Smith notes that “In Antony and Cleopatra (1606) … the general’s languorous “dotage” – a word associated with old age in King Lear [1606] – is contrasted in the play’s first scene with the fire of ‘scarcebearded Caesar’ [1606] (1.1.1, 22).” Shakespeare and Masculinity, 81. 24 I am drawing here on Smith, 83–5. 25 Howard Erskine-Hill, The Augustan Idea of English Literature (London: Edward Arnold, 1983). 26 Malcolm R. Smuts, “Jonson’s Poetaster and the Politics of Defamation,” English Literary Renaissance 49.2 (Autumn 2019): 231, 224–47. 27 Poetaster follows The Case is Altered (performed 1597); The Isle of Dogs (performed 1597: lost play); Every Man in His Humour (performed 1598); Every Man Out of His Humour (performed 1599); Cynthia’s Revels: The Fountain of Self-Love (performed 1600?). See Sanders, ed. Ben Jonson, xxi. 28 Thomas Dekker used the term “Poetomachia” [Poet’s War] in Satiromastix (“To the World,” line 7). See James P. Bednarz, Shakespeare and the Poets’ War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 2. 29 Michelle O’Callaghan, “Friends, Collaborators and Rivals,” Ben Jonson in Context, ed. Julie Sanders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

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2010), 53, 48–56. According to David Bevington, Poetaster’s “reputation is … inevitably tied to its role in the War of the Theatres.” The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson Online (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), para 2, accessed 13 December 2019, http:// universitypublishingonline.org/cambridge/benjonson/k/essays/stage_ history_Poetaster/3/. 30 Their birthdates are as follows: Dekker 1572; Marston 1576; Jonson 1572. 31 John Mulryan, “Jonson’s Classicism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ben Jonson, ed. Richard Harp and Stanley Stewart (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 166, 163–74. 32 Bevington, Ben Jonson, online, paras 4–5. 33 M.L. Stapleton, “Marlovian Residue in Jonson’s Poetaster,” Early Modern Literary Studies 23 (2014): 2, 1–26, accessed 13 December 2019, https:// extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/journal/index.php/emls/article/view/192. This ambiguous approach to Ovid goes beyond Poetaster. As Heather James discusses, “The love-hate relationship of Elizabethan England for Ovid is widely known if not fully understood.” “Ben Jonson’s Light Reading,” in A Handbook to the Reception of Ovid, ed. John F. Miller and Carole E. Newlands (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 248, 246–61. 34 Cain, Ben Jonson, 77n1–2. 35 Joseph A. Dane, “The Ovids of Ben Jonson in Poetaster and in Epicoene,” Comparative Drama 13.3 (1979): 226, 222–34. 36 Erskine-Hill, The Augustan, 116. 37 Cain, Ben Jonson, 19. 38 Stapleton, “Marlovian Residue,” 18. 39 Carr, “Jonson and the Classics,” 297. 40 Stapleton, “Marlovian Residue,” 2. 41 One important exception is James Mulvihill, “Jonson’s Poetaster and the Ovidian Debate,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 22.2 (1982): 239–55. 42 Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1993), 146, 142–8. 43 Ibid., 146. 44 Sara Van den Berg, “True Relation: The Life and Career of Ben Jonson,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ben Jonson, 1, 1–14. 45 “Often my father said, ‘Why do you try a profitless pursuit? Even the Maeonian [i.e. Homer] left no wealth,’” (Tristia IV.X.21-2); “Nor learning garrulous legal lore, nor set my voice for common case in the ungrateful forum” (Amores I.xv.5-6). Quoted in Cain, Ben Jonson (1995), 267.

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46 Bevington, Ben Jonson, online, para 10. 47 Bevington, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, para 10. 48 Ibid., para 9. 49 Ibid., para 14. 50 Cain, Ben Jonson, 62n3–4. 51 Evelyn Tribble, Early Modern Actors and Shakespeare’s Theatre: Thinking with the Body (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017), 20. 52 Bart van Es, “Shakespeare versus Blackfriars,” in Childhood, Education and the Stage in Early Modern England, ed. Richard Press and Deanne Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 109, 100–20. 53 Cain, Ben Jonson, 38. 54 Jonson, Poetaster, title page. On this company’s work, see Harry R. McCarthy’s forthcoming study Performing Early Modern Drama beyond Shakespeare: Edward’s Boys (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). 55 The scene runs from 0038.20 to 0043.20. Perry Mills, dir., When Paul’s Boys Met Edward’s Boys (2018). 56 Victoria Moul states that the “scene draws upon Ovid’s own Tristia as well as echoing Romeo and Juliet,” in “Ben Jonson’s Poetaster and the Location of Cultural Authority,” Translation and Literature 15.1 (2006): 24, 21–46. 57 Ibid., 24. 58 The folio lists the “principal Comedians” thus: Nathaniel Field, John Underwood, Salamon Pavy, William Ostler, Thomas Day and Thomas Marton. See Cain, Ben Jonson, 1995, 275–6. 59 David Kathman, “How Old Were Shakespeare’s Boy Actors?” Shakespeare Survey 58 (2005): 222, 220–46. 60 See Lucy Munro, Children of the Queen’s Revels: A Jacobean Theatre Company (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Van Es, “Shakespeare versus Blackfriers.” 61 J. McCarthy, “Ben Jonson and the Boy Company Tradition,” 12. 62 Peter Stallybrass in Van Es, “Shakespeare versus Blackfriars,” 102. 63 Jonson, Poetaster, A1v. 64 Matthew Steggle’s chapter “Jonson in the Elizabethan period” makes the case for considering the playwright in this distinct epoch. In Ben Jonson in Context, 15–22. 65 Tribble, Early Modern Actors, 23. 66 Munro, Children of the Queen’s Revels, 2. 67 Ibid. 68 Mario diGangi, “‘Male Deformities:’ Narcissus and the Reformation of Courtly Manners in Cynthia’s Revels,” in Ovid and the Renaissance

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Body, ed. Goran Stanivukovic (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 95, 94–114. 69 Lynn Meskill provides a book-length study of Jonson and Envy. Ben Jonson and Envy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 70 Van Es, “Shakespeare versus Blackfriars,” 102. 71 Janette, Dillon, “The Blackfriars Theatre and Indoor Theatres,” in Ben Jonson in Context, 126, 124–133. 72 Ben Morgan makes similar points for different reasons. “The Body,” in Ben Jonson in Context, 216–18, 212–20. 73 Cain, Ben Jonson, 69n1–2. 74 Meskill, Ben Jonson, 51. 75 Ovid: Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller, rev. G.P. Goold (Cambridge, M A: Harvard University Press, 1984). 76 See, for example, my introduction in Shakespeare and the Translation of Identity in Early Modern England, ed. Liz Oakley-Brown (London: Continuum, 2011), 1–21 and Lynn Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), esp. 62–94. Julian Koslow’s “Humanist Schooling and Ben Jonson’s Poetaster,” as its title suggests, provides an extended discussion of the topic. ELH 73.1 (2006): 119–59. 77 Golding, The. xv. bookes. of. P. Ovidius Naso, E2r-3v. 78 Meskill, Ben Jonson, 51. 79 My argument takes up and develops Cain’s keen observation: “Ovid’s Invidia is female, the Livor of Q is masculine.” Cain, Ben Jonson, 69n1–2. 80 Golding, The. xv. bookes. of. P. Ovidius Naso, E3r-E3v. 81 Tribble, Early Modern Actors, 62. 82 Anthony Ellis, Old Age, Masculinity, and Early Modern Drama (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), 6. 83 Valerie Traub, “Afterword,” Ovid and the Renaissance Body, 266, 260–8.

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9 Making a Politic Gentleman: The First Ars amatoria in English M.L. Stapleton

Honos alit artes. Ho[n]oure mayteineth kunnynge. Erasmus, Proverbes or adagies (1539)

Four years into the reign of Henry VIII, the house of Wynkyn de Worde produced an unusual quarto, The flores of Ovide de arte amandi with theyr englysshe afore them: and two alphabete tablys (1513).1 It is the earliest surviving publication of any of Ovid’s works in England. As was his custom, the master printed his greyhoundand-centaur device beneath the well-known sun, stars, and initials emblem of his late colleague and mentor, William Caxton, after the colophon. This gesture showed homage and demonstrated shrewdness, since it advertised the two men’s association, clearly beneficial to Wynkyn, a double trademark of quality.2 The Flores consists of forty-three leaves containing eighty-five distiches from the Ars amatoria, the likely source one of the frequently reprinted editions with commentary by the fifteenth-century Italian editor Bartolomeo Merula, stemming from the Ovid editiones principes of 1471.3 A colloquial English prose translation precedes the poem’s original elegiac couplet, along with the item number in triplicate. The Latin term for the digit accompanies the Roman and Arabic figures, every unit in effect a quadruple lesson in classics and rudimentary mathematics. Such thoroughness might have represented an effort to reintroduce numerals, since grammar schools frequently focused on Greek and Latin to the exclusion of all else, pupils unable

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to recognize familiar figures to indicate quantity, or, for that matter, to read words in their native tongue.4 A fulsome bilingual dictionary follows that identifies virtually every word Ovid used, Latin to English and vice-versa, the former section including a sophisticated shorthand system for identifying case and number or conjugation. Though Wynkyn included a pair of identical woodcuts of a birch-bearing praeceptor with a trio of pupils, this schoolbook was designed to aid an enlightened master practicing the comparatively painless pedagogy of double translation. Humanists strongly advocated this method throughout the sixteenth century, eschewing the traumatizing corporal punishment that the supple dun-coloured rods represented, though this detail might have been merely emblematic in the illustration, a means of identification. Learning ought not to emanate from fear and trembling, they reasoned. Only an incompetent master would swing a shillelagh at a little boy, as Erasmus observed: “Neyther do any torment chyldren more cruelly, the[n] they that canne not teache them.”5 The disarming familiarity of tone in the commentary and translations conceals the book’s strangeness. Perhaps this was deliberate. Its compiler’s droll Latin apology for his English orthography signals awareness that his spelling and grammar were atypical, even in an era resistant to standardization: “Si cui anglica ortographia non placeat: michi impericie [i.e., imperitia] parcat: non det impressorem vicio. Ut lingua mutatur: ita & noster calamus” (F L A.viii); [If English spelling displeases someone, he should spare me the charge of incompetence; it ought not to give the impression of a vice. Just as language changes, so does our pen]. Whether he meant that his mode of writing was retrograde or that English was ungovernable is difficult to discern. He used archaic diction, combined words not normally joined, and rendered his plurals in pseudo-Scots “-is” or “-ys.” Many of his r-consonants remained in a gloriously un-metathesized state. These characteristics do not appear frequently in the prose of Caxton or Malory. Some examples: “care not for the sone brynyng” (Aiii.); “Yeldeayan to the owner the pledge” (Aiiiv); “menys brestys or hartis” (A.iiii); “bendown with the weyght of theyr frutis” (Av). His means of expression does not resemble the spare, unadorned style that the great grammarians Robert Whittington and John Stanbridge practiced, and whom Wynkyn frequently published. Yet the Flores proves that the author’s facility in both languages was excellent, and his knowledge of Latin enviable. Besides, Erasmus had strongly approved of colloquialism in teaching Latin in De civilitate morum puerilium (1530).

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The text’s rarity argues that it was heavily used. The British Library seems to possess the sole copy, the Huntington having a photostat of it. Other elements in this first Ovid were not unusual. Of the roughly one thousand texts Wynkyn’s house produced in his half-century of innovative craftsmanship, several were schoolbooks. His master-pupil woodcut, in fact, appeared in other works intended to educate ­teachers in tandem with the students they instructed, such as John of Garland’s Synonima (1505) and the numerous editions of Stanbridge’s Accedentia (1505).6 He was a printer of smaller, inexpensive volumes for general use, so the more diminutive formats were standard for him. And some classical literature, though not a specialty, emanated from his Fleet Street shop: Aesop (1514), Virgil (1522), Terence (1529), and Cicero (1534). The Terence was in the same student-friendly format as its Ovidian predecessor, workaday English prose with the original Latin afterward. Yet the strangeness of the Flores lies not in such incidentals, but in its very existence. Little objectionable material could have been easily extracted from Terence’s wisdom. Ovid, of course, was different. Known to medieval and early modern readers as a great mythographer (Metamorphoses), creator of dramatic monologues by women (Heroides), calendar-maker (Fasti), and wistful poet of exile (Tristia, Ex ponto), his erotic poetry (the Ars amatoria, the Amores, and the Remedia amoris) provided him with an entirely different reputation indeed. Though these works found their uses in early medicine for curing the enduring pestilence of lovesickness, their early reception marked them out as sexual material, instruction in these matters by the magister or praeceptor Amoris, the schoolmaster of love himself. They might have been intended to be satirical and ironical, but readers still found them subversive, in Ovid’s time and afterward. The notorious Ars had resulted in his banishment to Tomis, on the Black Sea, as virtually all early printed books about him warned their readers. Caxton, in a passage that Wynkyn and the Flores editor must have seen in manuscript from his prose translation of the Metamorphoses (c. 1480), explained how Augustus “hade bannysshyd” Ovid “out of he contre for makynnge of ye book De arte amandi, which he had wreton. Or ellis for another thing by which he had grevid hym.”7 The Ars, then, would seem to have been a counterintuitive choice for a school text aimed at fashioning a gentleman of high moral character, as many such books recommended themselves, including

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Wynkyn’s publication of Erasmus’s metrical Cato pro pueris, otherwise known as Disticha Catonis (1513). This was a revision of Caxton’s first book printed in English (1477) that the older man is shown presenting to Edward IV, along with the translator, Earl Rivers, in various illuminated manuscripts. Youth, whether adolescens or iuvenis, fourteen and up, the least reliable of the seven ages of humankind, were well known to be immoderate in their appetites for drink, food, and sex, ruled by the planet Venus.8 Surely steeping young minds in Ovid’s poem would have only worsened these tendencies. His praeceptor recommends deceit in relationships with the weaker sex because they are, he alleges, faithless themselves by nature. Though women lie frequently, claimed misogynist tradition, their susceptibility to flattery renders them helpless to the very falsehoods the master designed to aid the enterprising young student in seducing them. Further, he claims, the main purpose of puellae et feminae is sexual. And all can be had. Wives are especially easy to corrupt if their husbands commit the double fault of ignoring them while hemming them in. Providing them with the attention that their spouses have foolishly withheld will have them on their backs in no time, happily collaborative. Given such cynicism and antifeminism, Marie de France and Christine de Pizan condemned the Latin Ars – or the paraphrases of the poem they read in Le roman de la rose or La clef d’amor.9 Yet medieval and early modern readers of both sexes also knew that much of the erotic counsel in the Ars was, so to speak, tonguein-cheek. In the Tristia, Ovid had explained to Augustus that his schoolmaster of love was a construct whose precepts were too stupid for any self-respecting seducer to follow, the result of a comical yet ironclad ironic distance between author and speaker. Medieval writers from Heloise to Chaucer recognized this dialectical tendency in the poem: “crede mihi, distant mores a carmine nostro – vita verecunda est, Musa iocosa mea” (Tr. 2.353-4) [I assure you, my character differs from my verse – my life is moral, my muse is playful”]10 And suppler minds could grasp that it was pointless to condemn a great writer for less savory elements when one could extract so much excellence from him. Thomas Nashe’s statement on such matters in the Anatomie of Absurditie (1589), albeit disingenuous, is typical: “I woulde not haue any man imagine that in praysing of Poetry, I endeuour to approoue Virgils vnchast Priapus, or Ouids obscenitie; I commend their witte, not their wantonnes, their learning, not their lust: yet euen as the Bee out of the bitterest flowers and sharpest thistles

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gathers honey, so out of the filthiest Fables, may profitable knowledge be sucked and selected.” Such material, however, would hardly be suitable for adolescens in schools: “tender youth ought to bee restrained for a time from the reading of such ribauldrie, least chewing ouer wantonlie the eares of theis Summer Corne, they be choaked with the haune before they can come at the karnell.” Though Nashe himself later revealed that Ovid was “the fountaine whence my streames doe flow” in The Choise of Valentines (c. 1590), his pronouncements, however insincere and designed to deflect peevish censorship, represented standard opinion.11 Therefore, Wynkyn’s choice of this questionable Ovidian text from which to extract flores in order to impress virtue on disorderly minds must have seemed insane to some who encountered it. The Flores is sui generis as a schoolbook and a cultural artifact, a text partaking of several sensibilities. Its medieval heritage shows in its subtle reformation of Ovid’s erotic treatise into a hornbook of goodly precepts, a tradition older than the fourteenth-century Ovide moralisé in verse and prose. Its humanism modulates this perspective by rejecting ham-handed moralizing despite the text’s implied purpose of inculcating virtue. And yet, Wynkyn’s pamphlet undermines these relatively gentle intentions by another strategy. The Flores, at times, acts as a subversive primer about masculinity. Its Ovidianism, not always defanged or gelded, informs students and their masters about more practical and sometimes unsavory aspects of life. The medium, the Ars amatoria, could have signaled as much to these potential readers: how to fashion a politic gentleman in a way humanism suggested: Honos alit artes. Ho[n]oure mayteineth kunnynge. Be a man neuer so excellent in anye scie[n]ce or feate, yf he be nothyng promoted or set by, anone he is discouraged, yea and al they that be studentes of the same, be lyke wyse dyscouraged. On ye contrary parte, let cunnynge persons be had in honest reputation and be worthyly preferred, anone ye shall se bothe the[m] and other by theyr exemple stryue who may excelle other. (AD fol. xxviv) In some ways, this is an extraordinary statement. Cunning, informed by wisdom, discretion, and craft, is a virtue, fostering excellence and competition for the purpose of excelling in a mediocre world. Ovid

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recommends much the same approach to life, his ars infinitely expandable to encompass more than the vocation of seducer. He would have been a natural auctor to the shrewd compiler of school texts seeking an unappreciated source of dicta, not an insane choice at all, fit for strivers everywhere. To be a man in the sixteenth century meant to be wise, competitive, practical, and wary.12 Machiavelli would have approved. Masculinity has established itself as a credible field of enquiry in the twenty-first century for the study of early modern literature and culture. Yet few scholars have explored the specific influence of classical texts and schooling on the formation of ideas of manhood in the nascent early modern era, 1475–1560. Tim Reinke-Williams ­identified four general critical trends that have arisen in the understanding of maleness in the years 1560–1780: the body, fatherhood, socializing, and politics. Alexandra Shepard shaped much of this discourse in her work on masculine codes before 1700. She argued that notions of honour varied more among men than women, and that these often depended on age and social status. Though men were privileged, not all enjoyed equal benefits, and fewer still were thought to be of a temperament that would allow them to handle themselves. Young men were thought to be especially ungovernable, their rogue behaviour not easily controlled, but tolerated from necessity. Shepard discovered that bachelors, for example, asserted themselves in pastimes such as competing in seasonal sports, chasing after women, and drinking, much as young men do now. Karen Harvey, often mentioned with Shepard, has noted that most studies of masculinity have not analyzed the influence of politics and religion on men who strove to gender themselves, a situation that Reinke-Williams has described as “a black hole” in the field. I would go further and argue that this scholarship has not accounted for the advent of printing and the rise of humanist pedagogy with its relentless emphasis on the mastery of classical languages and authors. Such foundational events directly governed the years that students of masculinity have generally considered, 1560–1800. This is why a text such as the Flores is so important. It directly and uniquely engages the four areas that Reinke-Williams identified. The theorizing of Shepard and Harvey partially illuminates its substance, along with the work of other important scholars: Susan Amussen, Anthony Fletcher, Elizabeth Foyster, and Anna Bryson.13 In re-forming the Ars and its sexually-oriented nature-analogies into adages for the forging of men possessed of sapientia and fortitudo,

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the Flores editor revealed himself to be as protean as the author he translated and as shrewd as the prototype of a politic gentleman into which he was helping young men form themselves. These select Ovidian proverbs advise the forward youth about pursuing social mobility. That Wynkyn’s compiler envisioned such sententiae would be happily bestowed by the successful masters who had risen in society might have struck him as a means of offering further encouragement. Such teachers, themselves “privileged learners,” in Ruth Karras’s phrase, demonstrated in their actively contemplative lives that the cultivation of reason, restraint, and intellectual activity were pursuits as worthy as bearing arms and exercising gallantry.14 It would hardly matter to the target audience that the Ars was the medium, so long as the shrewd and strong man emerged as a result. For the purpose of making men possessed of what Baldassare Castiglione would later term sprezzatura in Il cortegiano (1528), the Flores editor abstracted and diluted piquant analogies from the Ars between nature and the boudoir. Ovid might have intended the Ars as comic guidance for the novice pursuer of women in a nuanced and pleasing way, but his sixteenth-century emulator turned its lines into generalized, and more respectable, exempla. A student familiar with the ancient poem might have been able to imbibe the original context by a type of osmosis, but Wynkyn’s editor was truly artful in his reconfiguring. “An hunter knowith wel where he may strechout his netis to take hartis. and buckys. and he vnderstondith surely: in what valey a fromyng wylde bore shud tary commynly” (F L 3); “Scit bene venator: ceruis vbi retia tendat. / Scit bene: qua frendens valle moretur aper” (AA 1.45-6). “Shrubis be knoen to byrders. & he that may te[m] th whokys [i.e., tame hawks], that is to sey the fysher knowith whiche wattrs shuld be romyn moche fische” (FL 4); “Aucupibus noti frutices. qui sustinet hamos / Nouit: qu[a]e multo pisce natentur aqua[e]” (AA 1.47-8). This four-line passage listing four different types of animals to capture, the stag and boar by hunting, small birds by hawking, and fish by angling, suggests that by a discriminating type of aggression, the young man on the make, properly schooled, will be able to attain anything if he has mastered the pursuit of it. Without the coded allusion to women and seduction, the range is actually much broader and more ambitious than simple woman-chasing. A subtext encourages independence, the industry of turning occasions to profit, the science of problem-solving: practicality. Such distiches provide quotidian advice that the taker is free to modify to his own usage and needs.

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Counterintuitively, invoking Ovid out of context only buttresses the suggestion that a man should understand that pointless and arbitrary authority should be resisted and subverted for the sake of a civil society. Some speech should be free. Little was more abhorrent to Erasmus than the abusiveness of rote learning devoid of everyday application: “Nec vnq[ue] probaui literatoru[m] vulgus, qui pueros in his incucandis co[m]plures annos remorant” [I have no patience with the stupidity of the average teacher of grammar who wastes precious years in hammering rules into children’s heads]. The Flores compiler clearly hated stupidity, and like his great contemporary, knew that students learn best not by following rules but by experiencing the thought of those who have mastered them.15 That all these thinkers were men who would serve as commendable examples of manhood must have been part of his agenda. The Flores editor did not wish to forge men who were deficient in what was called gallantry in an age politer than our own. He ingeniously modified Ovid’s prescriptions for perpetrating as much lechery as a young man is able into sententiae that recommend the opposite course, or that refer to other matters instead. The ancient poet suggests that puellae will eventually fall into one’s bed because they are female animals who experience estrus and must therefore summon their mates: “Mollibus in pratis admugit femina tauro / Femina cornipedi semper adhinnit equo” (A A 1.279-80). Yet out of its frame, this merely offers elementary sex education: “The female, that is to sey the cow, lowith alwey to the bull in the soft delicate medows, and the female that is to sey the mare neyth to the horne fotide horse” (F L 7). In Ovid, a shrewd lover seduces his lady’s handmaiden to compromise her so that she must aid him in acquiring the larger prize, her mistress: “Non auis vtiliter viscatis effugit alis / Non bene de laxis cassibus exit aper” (A A 1.391-2). Here women are hinted at through the non-human: a bird with limed wings and a boar in the net. Again, however, the distich, removed from its place in the Ars amatoria, could be providing simple assistance in hunting, an activity with which many early modern men occupied themselves: “A byrde scapeth not awey prefetably for hym self: whan his wyngis be lymyd: and like whyse a bore gouth not lightly out of the nettis: whan they be let slake” (F L 11). The Ars provides other types of consolation. Though the irrational and changeable opposite sex can be difficult for sensible men to understand, forever tempting the forward youth into impatience and rash actions, everything has its season, and nature will assist his

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efforts to subdue women: “Non semper credenda ceres fallacibus aruis / Nec semper viridi concaua puppis aqu[a]e” (AA 1.401-2). In the Flores, the apothegm merely reminds the student that moderation and propriety in all things aids good living, seeds that sprout in a timely manner: “Sede shuld not at euery seson lyke by put or comyttyd to the deceuabyl feldys. ner the holowe shede at all sesons to the grene water” (F L 12). Ovid’s advice concerning proper appearance and demeanor for making men attractive to women translates easily into saws about general deportment, the Flores again anticipating Castiglione. Regular bathing, cleanliness, attention to tailoring, and the salutary effects of the outdoors can only be beneficial: “Let wortere plese the to vse it: whyle thu arte yong: let thy body be made dunne with the felde and opyn ayre: care not for the sone brynyng. but let the gowne be wel fittynge, and clyne wythout any spot” (FL 17); “[Munditiae] placeant: fuscentur corpora campo. / Sit bene conueniens & sine labe toga” (AA 1.513-14). Fingers and noses, touch and smell, perceivers and perceived, are crucial to perception: “Bothe let thy naylys nothyng apere out langer than thy fynguers: and let them be clene without filthe vndernethe: & it no grete heris stonde withyn thy holow nose holis” (FL 18); “Et nichil emineant: & sint sine sordibus vngues / Inque caua nullus stet tibi nare pilus” (1.519-20). Men should be clean, stylish, groomed without foppery, and healthful in appearance. Sprezzatura would seem to require more, implies the Flores editor, namely the facility in socializing, drinking, and cultivating an agreeable temperament thought to be de rigueur. Overindulgence in wine, says the Ars amatoria, can cause impotence and other horrors, but teetotaling when enjoying the company of prospective conquests might make one seem priggish. Such a mature observation would be easily translatable into general advice about socializing. Therefore: “A certen mesure of drynkynge shall be geuyn, or alowyde the of vs: so that bothe mynde and fete may fulfill theyr office, or dutye” (FL 20); “Certa tibi a nobis dabitur mentura bibendi / Officium pr[a]estent mensque pedesque suum” (A A 1.589-90). Clearly a sophisticated sensibility would make such moderation possible. Cultivating a good disposition is as beneficial for the cunning gentleman as it would be for the man who loves women: “Plesetful chereinyng getith many myndis principally. & tygousnes, or boysturs delying prouokyth hatride, and cruell batellys” (FL 41); “Dextera precipue capit indulgentia mentes. / Asperitas odium seuaque bella mouet” (A A 2.145-6).16

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Though much of this material may seem innocuous and banal, it reflects Lynn Enterline’s argument about the role of humanism in schooling, its lessons intended as a part of the “carefully planned intervention in social reproduction,” perhaps a gentle form of social dissonance.17 Gendered transfigurations of Ovid seem unconventional in this way, even daring. With the Ars amatoria disassembled before him, intellectually speaking, the Flores editor surely fathomed that fashioning a gentleman by redesigning some of the poem’s parts for schoolbook purposes would be a challenge. The activity would entail more subtle craft than carving motivational sayings out of nature-oriented libertinism and pounding Ovidian carpe diem back into the non-erotic Horatian form from which it had originated. He knew the ancient work well and understood that its semi-satiric contents innovatively intertwined sex, ­seduction, and deceit. Dismantling the woodwork while maintaining structural fitness would have required every skill he possessed as an editor. He intuited that select elegiac couplets ingrained with amorality were nonetheless too valuable to hack away altogether because of their utility as sententiae. So such passages needed to be wrested from their context more vigorously than others to eschew more completely what might offend or, worse, mislead. For instance, the less-thanrespectable counsel that a well-trained mind makes for a successful seducer nevertheless advocates the unimpeachable virtue of mental discipline as a subtext. If the erotic content were reduced to sawdust, the foundational concepts could be reframed as prescriptions for manly and healthful self-denial, not effeminate self-indulgence. Keith Thomas argued that schools advanced this principle of mastering one’s behaviour as “a valuable preparation for the renunciation upon which later success depended.”18 A man should live honestly and rightly: “Yeldeayan [Yield again] to the owner the pledge: or is that is left with you in kepyng what he callith for hit. Let charetably loue kepe his couenandis. let deseyt, or grlde be awey fro you. and wholde yoare handis voyde gylties as hungylty of murther” (F L 27). Holding the hands void and guiltless as unguilty of murder can only be received as good advice: “Reddite depositum: pietas sua f[o]edera seruet: / Fraus absit vacua[s] c[a]edis habete manus” (A A 1.641-2). One need not know that this section of Ovid’s treatise proposes that women will believe fanciful promises, no matter how potentially detrimental to them, and therefore deluding them makes sense: “Ludite, si sapitis, solas impune puellas” (643) [If you are wise, cheat women only, and avoid trouble”].

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Some Ovidian advice, the Flores editor might have reasoned, should stand undiluted, regardless of content, for the making of men. Two interrelated adages argue as much in their offering of counsel and in their mimetic exemplification of what such a rhetorical construction should do. “Malo accepto, stultus sapit. The fole, whe[n] he hath take[n] hurte, waxeth wise. The wise man seeth the daunger & mischiefe of thynges afore hand.” Therefore, “Fœlix quem faciunt aliena pericula cautum. He is happy, whom other mens perilles maketh ware” (A D fol. iii). Serviceable, “lived-in” experience of misfortune, one’s own and that of others, might help him or her avoid future disasters of one’s own making. Love, for example, is dangerous because of its interference with its sufferer’s judgment. As a result, “In the beginning first of al labour to tynd it that th[ou] may deser to loue for thyn own p[r]ofit the which co[m]myst now first a neue souldier i to harmes” (FL 2). Arms, both military and physical, exacerbate the possibility of harm in love’s war. “Principio, quod amare velis: reperire labora: / Qui noua nunc primum miles in arma venis” (AA 1.35-6). If love is a war, the respectable stuff of dynasties and heirs and principalities, there is no reason to conceal the presiding role of the goddess of love, either. “Whyle ther is tyme with vs of comynyng: fle forre [far] hens thy rude vplondishe shamefastnes: or both fortune, & the goddes of loue helpe a bolde man” (FL 24). Ovid knew that Venus and Fortune favour the bold: “Colloquii dum tempus abest: fuge rustice longe: / Hinc pudor audacem Forsque Venusque iuuant” (AA 1.607-8). This slyly revises the more wholesome and conventional Vergilian aphorism that the Flores editor might have encountered in Erasmian form: “Audaces fortuna iuuat. Fortune helpeth men of good courage” (AD fol. viiiv). A man possessed of authentic masculinity should know what to do in amorous combat. Various Ovidian loci remained eminently useful as pedagogical tools in the sixteenth century, albeit their deeper context could not be easily uprooted. Richard Halpern’s notion of schoolmasterly “constructive interference” with texts for student benefit appears to find dramatic fulfillment in such activity.19 Additionally, these acts of alteration by the Flores editor, along with the sheer pragmatic spirit of some examples he chose, would seem to anticipate John Colet: “latyn speche was before the rules, not the rules before the latyn speche. Besy imitacyon with tongue and penne, more auayleth shortly to get the true eloquent speche, than all the tradicions, rules, and

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precepts of maysters.”20 This reflects the humanist championing of such new approaches and styles in hopes of eradicating the excesses of scholasticism, whatever those were perceived to be, promulgated by ignorant pedants. A man should be sophisticated and supple in his thinking, not a novice who needs to remember lists of impractical precepts before acting. Few statements in Ovid’s treatise have been as offensive to women as “cunctas / Posse capi” (AA1.269-70) [All of them might be snared]. The Ars reworks this saw continually, and the Flores recalibrates it copiously. For example, Ovid’s analogy between the unlikeliness of animals eschewing their instincts and women’s desire to be approached and seduced becomes a curiously elliptical set of observations about nature: “Let birdis kepe sile[n]s afore ver time: grashopis afore sumer. let the dog of the hille menal[ius] (that is to sey the grau[n]t or spanyel) such as be broght vp there: gyue it back to the hare: takying no hede of hym afore sum[m]er” (FL 6). Maenalus, a town in Greece apparently known for its rabbit-chasing, hill-climbing spaniels, is the subject of the couplet the Flores renders: “Vere prius volucres taceant [a]estate cicad[a]e, / M[a]enalius lepori det sua terga cani” (A A 1.271-2). However, what its editor eschews is the essential comparative clause: “Femina quam iuveni blande temptata repugnant” (273) [than a woman persuasively wooed would resist a lover]. Though the advice is hardly naïve or unworldly, its shrewdness could not be classified as offensive without considerable difficulty. In another case, the Flores sanitizes a pungent Ovidian observation into an aphorism that a man in a difficult situation might remember, one obversely analogous to the disingenuous proverb with which Iago baits Othello. Surely it is ridiculous to say, “That Cuckold liues in blisse, / Who certaine of his Fate, loues not his wronger” (Othello III.iii.167-8). No man bears affection for such an interloper, nor could he, truly wronged, be happy about the circumstances. All that Shakespeare’s hero discerns is the key term and perhaps processes his treacherous friend’s phrase as the Ars has it, i.e., the cuckold is happy because he is uncertain of his fate and thereby knows not his wronger. Thus, befriending the husband makes the having of his wife all the easier, such as deferring to him at the table in her presence, “Siue sit inferior, seu par: prior omnia sumat: / Nec dubites vlli verba secunda loqui” (A A 1.583-4) [Whether he be your inferior or your peer, let him take everything in front of you, nor should you hesitate to let

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him do all the talking”]. The Flores omits the clarifying line that follows, “Tuta frequensque via est, per amici fallere nomen” (585) [It is a safe and often-followed path to deceive under the name of friend]. So in the lesson, the befriended husband becomes a woman-less companion to whom one should show good manners: “Let thy mate take al thyngis at the tabyl. first yere thu begyn whether he be of lower degre, or equale with the. nere dout not to speke the secund wordis to hym sufferinge hym to haue the first bothe of the meet, and wordes: if he wole” (F L 19). The advice that a man should be hospitable and magnanimous to another is excellent. The Flores editor knew that readers of the Ars who relished the unexpurgated version of the above counsel have equally cherished the two-word imperative phrase “Fallite fallentes” (AA 645). Erasmus’s version, “Cretiza cum Cretinsi. Practyse craft wyth ye craftie” (A D fol.  ix) waxes Italianate. Ovid’s couplet runs: “Fallite fallentes: ex magna parte prophanum / Sunt genus: in laqueos quos posuere cadant” (1.645-6) [Deceive the deceivers; they are mostly an unrighteous sort; let them fall into the snare which they have laid”]. And this is how Merula rendered the passage in the Latin text that the Flores editor probably used. To ensure there could be no doubt as to what Merula believed the text meant, his gloss clarifies with the aid of grammatical gender: “In laqu[e]os[:] in insidias. Quos posuere quas molit[ae] sunt amantibus” [In snares: in treacheries. Those that those (women) have endeavoured to lay for their (male) lovers].21 But Wynkyn’s schoolbook compiler decided that removing the proverb from its context was absolutely necessary for his purposes. Further, he apparently decided to outdo Ovid, Merula, and Erasmus and, again, eschew the outward antifeminism: “Fallite fallentes. Neque enim lex iustior ulla est. / Quam necis artifices arte perire sua” [Deceive the deceivers. For there is no juster law than that contrivers of death should perish by their own contrivances]. He conflates the womanunfriendly couplet with a later distich that proffers a somewhat questionable form of righteousness, which goes this way in the Ars: “Iustus uterque fuit: neque enim lex aequior ulla est / Quam necis artifices arte perire sua” (1.655-6) [Both were just, for there is no juster law than that contrivers of death should perish by their own contrivances”].22 The Flores combination continues the realpolitik of the times: “Begyle the begylers. For ther is no law more ryghtous tha[n] that the craftis men of dethe, or myschefe shulde perishe by theyr owne crafte, & hondy warke” (FL 28). Henry VIII and his fellow European monarchs

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would use such logic to liquidate their enemies, whether foreign or domestic. And the appropriation by the Flores editor for the making of men implies that such pragmatism did not require misogyny as a catalyst. The unconventionality of the Flores and its subversive source material implies another purpose, perhaps, besides those of an elementary language primer and an implicit critique of platitudinous pieties regarding manhood and manliness. Maybe it was meant to address students in a somewhat radical way, as future intellectual peers. Perhaps its compiler or sponsor intended its worldliness and familiarity as a means of cultivating intimacy and collegiality, a preventative against adolescent alienation, restlessness, and disenfranchisement, all conducive to becoming fighters in the streets or stealing from the unjustly wealthy. Some of the Ovidian adagia included do not seem to have another function, since they could not easily be disguised or altered to be anything else than what they were. They advise in the full-throated voice of the magister Amoris that the successful seduction of women depends on dissimulation and other types of politic, crafty, “suttyl” behaviours. Ultimately, why the editor chose to include these in the Flores is mysterious and likely to remain so, though if its morally ambiguous material impressed the boys or ­garnered their respect and cooperation by addressing them as adults, the unadulterated Ovidian passages might have been intended to enhance his strategy. Admittedly, the inclusion of some Ovidian wisdom in the Flores defies explanation. It is difficult to imagine a responsible father counseling his fourteen-year-old son that the seduction of girls his own age would be more likely of success if he avoided drunkenness, as if an active sex life and a taste for drink were normal for beardless boys. But the Flores mysteriously includes this without qualification, offering no easy transference to a less worldly context. Ovid observes that the overconsumption of alcohol interferes with seductive eloquence: “Ebrietas vt vera nocet: sic ficta iuuabit. / Fac: titubet bl[a]esso sub dola lingua sono” (A A 1.597-8). It would be no more wholesome to recommend pretended inebriation to aid in the cause: “Like as very dronkynnes indede hurtith: euyn so feynede dronkennes shall helpe, or p[ro]fet otherwhyle therefore cause that thy suttyl deceytfull tunge that is to sey, that thy tunge whan thu gost about suttiltes: may stu[m]bil with a bussynge sonde” (F L 22). The assumption couched in the second person that the young seeker of pubescent feminine

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pulchritude is already possessed of a “suttyl deceytfull tunge” could hardly be moralized or rationalized away, either. And “suttilties,” like “suttyl,” possessed a much stronger, negative meaning in the early sixteenth century: “Craftiness, cunning, esp. of a treacherous or underhand nature; slyness, guile” (OED subtlety n. 3.b). Drinking and wenching are presented as themselves, without adulteration, part of the assumed accoutrements of a man of the world, but at odds with the general tenor of the Flores. Indeed, an adult in any period, in this case the “suttyl” man, already knows that some form of ars governs love, as the magister Amoris teaches. Yet the sixteenth-century adolescent novice clearly did not possess this knowledge any more than his counterparts five hundred years later, regardless of the availability of implicitly instructive cabletelevision programming. An early modern youth might have encountered more conventional wisdom, such as that proffered by, once again, Erasmus: Ex aspectu nascitur amor. Of syght is loue gendred. Noma[n] loueth ye thynge he knoweth not, of companyenge and resortynge together spryngeth mutuall loue. And namelye the eyes be lures & baytes of loue. Wherfore yf thou woll not loue the thynge ye is vnlawfull for the to loue, absteyne from beholdynge. He that beholdeth a woman (sayth Christ) wyth a lust vnto her, hath alredye played an aduowterers parte wt her in hys harte. (AD fol. xjv) Oddly, the eyes as “lures & baytes of loue” squares with the view of  the matter in the Ars, though the moralized caveat against sight‑engendered lust does not. This is why the Flores editor’s first choice of Ovidian locus in the Flores must have struck its users as entirely unconventional, a direct contradiction of standard pieties: “Arte citt[a]e, veloque rates, remoque reguntur / Arte leuis currus: arte regendus amor” (A A 1.3-4). In paraphrased form, the first thing that the editor thought his readers should learn about loving was that guile should be employed: “Swifte shippis be gouerned be craft / & with seale and oure & a light swyfte chace is gouerned by crafte: and lyke wyse loue most be gouerned by crafte” (F L 1). The key term, interchangeable with “art,” posseses negative overtones in its early sixteenth-century usage: “In a bad sense: Skill or art applied to deceive

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or overreach; decit, guile, fraud, cunning … An application of deceit; a trick, fraud, artifice” (OED craft n.4.a-b). What sort of lesson is this for young men who know nothing about love or women? Or, for that matter, who was meant to benefit from a similar observation in the middle of the text regarding flattery? “Blanditiis animum furtim deprendere fas est: / Vt pendens liquida ripa subibit aqua” (AA 1.61920); “It is lauful to gete a bodyis mynde priuely by flatteryngis: so to faul in fauer with hym. as the hangyng bancke shal com vnder the clere watyr: what hit hath preueyly fretyn awey the erthe vndernethe” (FL 26). Lord Chesterfield would give almost exactly the same advice to his natural son two centuries later. In the event that the message of this couplet and translation was unclear or, conversely, seemed blatantly cynical, there is hope: “S[a]epe tepens vere c[o]epit simulator amare. / S[a]epeque quod incipiens finxerat esse fuit” (AA 1.615-16); “A feyner of loue slacke at the begynnyng hath oftyntymis in conclusio[n] fal an honde to loue ernestly: & hath byn oftymys a mater indede afterwarde that he hath feynid hymselfe to be: whan he beganne” (F L 25). So: the subtle lover, one who understands that flattery and craftiness are his allies in seducing women, might discover in the midst of his chicanery that he can love after all, and sincerely. How reassuring this must have been to the man aware of his own corruption. But what would London schoolboys have known about the perplexing complexities of feigned love to begin with? Enterline argues that the concept of imitation as presented in the humanist schoolroom, with its constant stress on learning to copy the styles of great writers and then make them one’s own, must have taught a type of deceit, that one should not be oneself, which might have bred cynicism.23 This theory, ingenious and entirely conducive to Ovidian chicanery, predicts an outcome for this pedagogical convention wildly divergent from its early modern intent, however familiar it might seem to us. Still, the Flores editor, as if to anticipate such an example of the amorphousness of literary identity half a millennium earlier, includes material in his schoolbook designed to stymie dishonesty, in contradiction to other passages that recommend craft in love. Simply put, the master of love frequently discredits himself as an authority, albeit implicitly and ironically, in a strange conjunction with the standard counsel: “Veritas simplex oratio. Trouthes tale is simple, he that meaneth good fayth, goeth not aboute to glose hys communicatio[n] wyth painted wordes” (A D fol. xiiijv). Though a

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reader’s awareness of the narrator’s studied inconsistency in the entirety of the Ars amatoria aids in its analysis, a peruser of the Flores unfamiliar with Ovid’s poem as a whole might wonder why the ­compiler included these self-consciously revealing passages. It might be expected after reading the first four hundred lines of the poem that the narrator might defend himself in some way: “Non ego per pr[a]eceps: & acuta cacumina vadam / Nec iuuenu[m] quisquam. me duce captus erit” (AA 1.381-2). In short, he does not give faulty advice or proceed by erecting needless difficulties to strew in his path: “I wol not goo cu[m]mberly by en hedlyng passage & sharpe rought hilly clyfis. neryet any body of yong folke shal be bygylid whyle I am is gyde” (FL 10). He claims to be entirely reliable and credible. But why would a speaker so endowed feel the need to say so? His actions and words would have already established his reliability and credibility. And what bit of wisdom, besides an implicit message to tell truth and shame the devil, could the Flores editor meant to have transmitted by choosing the lines for translation? The self-sabotaging tendency becomes stronger in the third book of the poem, and more pronounced in the bilingual text: “Ducere consuescat multas manus vna figuras. / Ah pereant per quos ista monenda mihi” (AA 3.493-4). That is, though a person might need to imitate different types of handwriting to protect him or herself, it is unfortunate that someone would need such advice, and from someone such as himself. “Let oon man hand vse to draw mony maner figur[e]; ah I prey god: they come to euyl prese: by whome these wordis shuld be exortid & seyd of me” (FL 77). Though Ovid’s original point is aimed at women attempting to protect their reputations against the perfidity of their blackmailing handmaids, treacherous trulls all, the transference here makes no difference, its subtlety senseless in the context of the schoolbook and again openly undermining the speaker as an authority. This becomes even more pronounced toward the end of the Ars amatoria and the Flores: “Quo feror insanus? quid ap[er]to pectore in hoste[m]. / Mittor, & indicio prodor ab ipse meo” (A A 3.667-8); “whyther am I brought madde man that I am. why am I fynde be myn own madnes ayenst myn emny with my brest opyn vnharnest: & am be trade myselfe through myn own shewynge: p[re]sentynge myself folyshly” (F L 83). The master speaks ironically to the women he has been addressing in the third book of the Ars that someone like him usually does not reveal his technique, though he presents himself rather than them as prey. And

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if the students using the Flores were keeping track of its many assertions, why would these disavowals of reliability not destabilize Ovid’s authority, however fragmented? Instead, perhaps, they somehow undermined the idea that deceit was as inevitable or as necessary as Enterline supposes, that it was acceptable “to be trade myselfe through myn own shewing,” and “folyshly,” at that. Another implicit possi­ bility is that the novice, the youth who would become the man, should learn not to trust any authority blindly. Even the words of those recommending the guile, craft, or art of the successful man should not be accepted uncritically. The daring and artistry of the Flores editor in using Ovid can hardly be disputed, no matter what his adjunctive purpose: language training, social subversion, gentlemanly advice, or preparation for a cruel and predatory world. Amidst such morally ambiguous material, some of it surprisingly undiluted, he might have been tempted to include an aphorism from the accompanying poem to the Ars amatoria, the Remedia amoris. Sometimes described as its fourth book, this comic prescription of cures for love was a medieval medical text. Erasmus alludes to it in the Adages: “Satius est initijs mederi, q[ui] fini. Better it is to remedy the begynnynges then the endes. Stoppe a disease (sayeth the poete Ouide) whyle it is in the commynge” (fol. ix v). Arguably, this is what the Flores was meant to do: “Principiis obsta; sero medicina paratur, / cum mala per longas convaluere moras” (R A  91-2) [Resist beginnings; too late is the medicine prepared, when the disease has gained strength by long delay]. Here the praeceptor means to contradict his earlier advice in the Ars by recommending that the lover would be better off by avoiding love altogether. Above all, one should not hurry: Festina lente, as Aldus’s emblem of the dolphin and anchor symbolized. The Flores editor knew this well, which he showed in what is probably the most pungent excerpt of Ovid’s love treatise he included: “Crede michi: Veneris non est [pro]peranda voluptas / Sed sensim tarda perficienda mora” (A A 2.717-18). In the translation, he added a pilcrow for extra emphasis: “¶ Beleue me verily: the bodily plesure of the wanton fleshe is not to be made hast fore. but it shulde be performyde with a slowe let tariynge by litil & litil: what nature felith his tyme in a maner constrayng thereto” (FL 59). Why should this have been included? Again, Erasmus provides the best answer, one that should guide anyone teaching the young, no matter what the subject: “Candidæ musarum ianuæ. The

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doores of the muses be without enuye, that is to saye, learned persons ought frely, gentylly and wythout enuye admytte other vnto them that desyre to be taught or informed of them” (AD fol. xijv). Perhaps the Ovid of the Flores was the ultimate schoolmaster in explaining that the learning young men might have resisted, as important as the sex they continuously pursued, should be approached in the same way: freely, and without haste. No t e s   1 All references to the Flores are by folio number in parentheses with the abbreviation FL (London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1513). I have supplied modern line-numbers for quotations from the Ars amatoria and the Remedia amoris, though the text differs slightly in its incidentals from modern ­editions. Modern English translations in square brackets are based upon those in The Art of Love and Other Poems, trans. J.H. Mozley, rev. G.P. Goold (Cambridge, M A: Harvard University Press, 1979). For references to Richard Tavener’s translation of Erasmus’s adages, I use Prouerbes or adagies with newe addicions gathered out of the Chiliades of Erasmus by Richard Tauener (London: Richard Bankes, 1539), with folio numbers in parentheses and the abbreviation AD.   2 See Martha W. Driver, “The Illustrated De Worde: An Overview,” Studies in Iconography 17 (1996): 351, 349–403.   3 See Merula, Compendiosa uberrima elucidatio in Ouidiu[m] de arte amandi et remedio amoris, Per Bartholomeum merula mantuanus iam in luce[m] edita (Venezia: Giovannai Tacuino, 1494). This was a reprint of the 1491 edition. The editiones principes were published in Rome and Bologna two decades earlier.   4 See Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Geneaology of Capital (Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press, 1991), 23.   5 For Erasmus [of Rotterdam], see A treatise of Schemes and Tropes very profytable for the better vnderstanding of good authors, gathered out of the best Grammarians and Orators by Rychard Sherry Londoner (London: John Day, 1550), Miv. The study of rhetoric helped with humanist programs based on hegemony and consent rather than force and coercion. Roger Ascham: “the Scholehouse should be in deede, as it is called by name, the house of playe and pleasure, and not of feare and bondage.” Richard Mulcaster: “For gentlenesse and curtesie towarde children,

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I do think it more needefull than beating, and ever to be wished.” Juan Luis Vives thought it was best to employ jokes and stories to aid with learning. See Halpern, Primitive Accumulation, 28.  6 Garland, Synonima magistri Iohannis de garlandia cu[m] expositione magistri Galfridianglici (London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1505). Wynkyn ­published reprints of the text in 1514, 1517, and 1518. All used the same woodcut as the Flores features on its title page. For John Stanbridge, see Accidentia Ex Stanbrigiana Editione Nuper Recognita, Et Castigata (London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1505) and its many reprintings.   7 See William Caxton, The Booke of Ovyde Named Metamorphose, ed. Richard J. Moll (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2013), 497. This is a ­paraphrase of the reasons for banishment that Ovid had adduced: “duo crimina, carmen et error” (Tristia 2.207).   8 Ruth Mazo Karras, From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 14.   9 de France and de Pizan, in The Comedy of Eros: Medieval French Guides to the Art of Love, 2nd ed., trans. Norman R. Shapiro, notes and commentaries by James B. Wadsworth and Betsy Bowden (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997). 10 Tristia [and] Ex Ponto, trans. A.L. Wheeler, rev. G.P. Goold (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1985), 50–1. 11 Nashe, The Works of Thomas Nashe, 5 vols, ed. R.B. McKerrow, rev. ed. F.P. Wilson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), 1:29–30; 3:415. 12 Some scholarship on schooling that informed my project: Keith Thomas, Rule and Misrule in the Schools of Early Modern England: The Stanton Lecture, 1975 (Reading: University of Reading, 1976); Ruth Mazo Karras, Boys to Men; Jennifer C. Vaught, Masculinity and Emotion in Early Modern English Literature (New York: Routledge, 2016); Lynn Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 2012; Albrecht Classen, ed., Childhood in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: The Results of a Paradigm Shift in the History of Mentality (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005); Richard Halpern, Primitive Accumulation; T.W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, 2 vols (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944). 13 Tim Reinke-Williams, “Manhood and Masculinity in Early Modern England,” History Compass 12.9 (2014): 685–93; Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Karen Harvey, “The History of Masculinity, circa 1650-1800,” Journal of British Studies 44.2 (April 2005): 296–311;

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Susan Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988); Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England 1500–1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Elizabeth Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex, and Marriage (London: Longman, 1999); Anna Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). 14 Karras, Boys to Men, 1. 15 Text: Erasmi Roterodami De ratione studij, ac legendi interpretandique authores libellus aureus (Strasbourg: Matthias Schürer, 1518), Aiiv; translation: William Harrison Woodward, Desiderius Erasmus Concerning the Aim and Method of Education (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1904), 164. See also Halpern, Primitive Accumulation, 31. 16 The OED lists no such word as “tygousnes.” Perhaps it is an early form of “litigiousness,” meaning something like “truculence.” 17 Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom, 5. 18 Thomas, Rule and Misrule: “More than any other contemporary institution, the school was dominated by the hourglass, the clock, and the bell. Schooling was meant to teach application and self-control, sitting still for hours at a time” (6). 19 Halpern, Primitive Accumulation, 30. 20 See Samuel Knight, The Life of Dr. John Colet (Oxford: Clarendon, 1823), 390. 21 Merula, trans., Compendiosa uberrima, fol. xvii 22 Ovid’s examples are Thrasius, who counseled human sacrifice to Busiris to avoid famine, and Perillus, who made a bull to roast people in for Phalaris. Both artists were killed in the way they had recommended. 23 Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom, 7–8.

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10 Boys to Men: Fashioning Masculinity and Parody in the Ovidian Epyllia Sarah Carter

The Ovidian epyllia are almost exclusively concerned with the desire of young male characters, both as subjects and objects, and often the authors’ creative imitation, appropriation, and reception of Ovid in this type of narrative poetry constitute a judicious alteration of age, appearance, and responsiveness in order to achieve such a focus. As these texts are without exception also written by young men, often in a coterie environment, there exists a critical history of claiming such ironic and erotic texts are accounts of sexual and (homo)social maturation. This essay will explore how such texts interrogate and promote cultural expectations of masculinity and manhood, and the potential tension between the culturally prescriptive assertion of appropriate gender roles in the texts and their self-consciousness, irony, eroticism, and parodic and intertextual natures. The epyllia are intensely intertextual, containing transpositions of Ovid’s narratives, wider mythology, and, crucially, persistent references to and echoes of comparable texts within the genre. Parody is also intertextual because it presupposes knowledge of existing texts, genres, and discourses. What is of interest in this essay are the parodic intertextual relations in works concerned with the formation of masculinity and male sexuality, and the potential to parody cultural and textual constructions of masculinity itself. The essay will argue that the epyllia, as a genre, promote a version of mature masculinity via an understanding of Ovidian poetry and the circumstances of the texts’ production. Only by reading the epyllia via an intertextual lens can their participation in discourse about the formation of “appropriate” masculinity be fully explored.

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As stated above, parody is by definition intertextual, because the genre relies for its effect on allusions made to previous texts, concepts, and genres, etc. Scholars of parody are at pains to assert that parody is more than one of a multitude of forms of intertextuality and that it crucially precedes the theory of intertextuality by some millennia.1 As Margaret A. Rose states, “Many others since have taken up the term intertextuality and applied it back to parody without commenting on the fact that it was largely from the analysis of parody works that the concept had been derived in the first place.”2 We can suggest, however, that all parody is intertextual but that not all intertextuality is parodic. There are some thought-provoking definitions to consider here. Aristotle describes a parodia as a narrative poem “in the metre and vocabulary of epic poems, but treating a light, satirical, or mock heroic subject.”3 Later Greek and Roman writers, continues Simon Dentith, also “use the term and its grammatical cognates to refer to a more widespread practice of quotation, not necessarily humorous, in which writers and speakers introduce allusions to previous texts. Indeed, this is a more frequent use of the term.”4 Elements to stress in the definition of parody include the distinction of parody from satire or travesty, which Dentith explains thus: “the textual transformation which it [parody] performs is done in a playful rather than a satirical manner.”5 Similarly, Rose argues that the prime feature of parody “is the establishment in the parody of comic discrepancy or incongruity between the original work and its ‘imitation’ and transformation.”6 Rose traces the relationship between Julia Kristeva’s formation of intertextual theory from her work on the Russian formalists’ and Mikhail Bakhtin’s analyses of polyphonic, comic, parodic texts, but notes that, ironically, such theory “has come to be used to ignore the parodic and comic character of those texts.”7 The element of absurdity is clear in an early modern understanding of parody, as Rose notes: “Ben Jonson’s use of it in Act V, scene v of his Every Man in his Humour [1598] to describe an imitation of popular verses which made them more ‘absurd’ than they were (‘A Parodie! A parodie! With a kind of miraculous gift to make it absurder than it was’).”8 Evidently, discussions of parody both explicitly and implicitly rest on its intertextual nature. Dentith notes that parodic “discursive interactions are characterised by the imitation and repetition, derisive or otherwise, of another’s words”; “parody is one of the many forms of intertextual allusion out of which texts are produced” and that “In

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this sense, parody forms part of a range of cultural practices, which allude, with deliberate evaluative intonation, to precursor texts,” and “includes any cultural practice which provides a relatively polemical allusive imitation of another cultural production or practice.”9 Parody depends on the recognition of precursor texts for its effect and accordingly, Linda Hutcheon stresses the active role of the reader in parody: writers of parody “rely on the competence of the reader (viewer, ­listener) of the parody;” as well as the crucial element of intent.10 All of these considerations function within the established theory of intertextuality as the examination of the interrelatedness of all “texts” (be they written works, cultural practices, non-written art forms, etc.), characterized as an infinite and non-linear network of allusion, influence, quotation, adaptation, and imitation. Such procedures may be both unconscious and conscious manifestations on the writers’ (in this case) behalf and constitute a way of describing or articulating the perpetuation of ideologies through a cultural subconscious. In a more literal but usefully period-specific understanding of intertextual practice, we can look to the early modern period’s engagement with classical precedents, the practice of creative imitation, and in the tradition of poems written specifically as rejoinders (the most famous being the series of poems responding to Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” [c. 1590]).11 Such “answering back”12 serves as an opportunity to refute, parody, praise or perpetuate contemporary discourses, whether specifically or generally. Interestingly, John Florio defines parody in 1598 as “a turning of a verse by altering some words”; the “turn” here conveying this (inter)textual response back to a precursor text (or texts).13 In relation to what early modern writers are utilising parody for, Dentith writes: Certainly [...] “imitation,” is widespread in sixteenth- and seventeenth-­century writing; in this form, a revered classical model is imitated and updated, and thus given a particular contemporary force. If this is one of the principal forms in which a belated culture manages its relationship to its cultural predecessors, it can be contrasted to the contemporary world. Where a more polemical relation to the cultural past often expresses itself in the practice of “writing back”: the canonic texts of the past are scrutinised, challenged, and parodied in the name of the ­subject positions (of class, race, or gender) which they are seen to exclude. In both these periods, then, parody and its related

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forms are widespread, though the particular polemical direct that these forms adopt differs widely.14 In relation to the epyllia, as Jim Ellis writes, “Like any genre, the epyllion exists in relation to literary systems that extend both synchronically and diachronically, although the epyllion is unusual in the extent to which its connections to other genres are central to its functioning.”15 This is the language of intertextuality. Ellis highlights reading the genre as a response to the previous centuries’ Christianizing and moralizing of Ovid and in response to the contemporary fashion for Petrarchan poetry, and we can add to this a response to other poems in the genre,16 to contemporary social structures, and to conventional artistic expressions or textual constructions of desire, sexuality, and masculinity. Such responses constitute an “answering back,” and this playful insolence or resistance to precursor texts also manifests in the ironic tone, humour, and arguably parodic nature of the epyllia. The epyllia are as William Keach puts it, characterized by an “ironic literary self-consciousness.”17 That is not to claim, however, that the epyllia promote a countercultural resistance to dominant ideologies of gender, sexuality, and power, in terms of rigid definitions of masculine behaviour, heteronormativity, and patriarchy. These ironic, erotic, and parodic texts ambiguously present non-normative modes of desire, tragic ends for characters that do and do not conform to expectation, and culturally prescriptive and restrictive gendered behaviour compliant with normative social structures: “The poems are stories of sexual difference, sexual desire, and gender protocol [...] Within the poems characters are instructed on behaviour appropriate to their sex and sex itself, and are schooled in the differences that mark out male and female.”18 For example, Salmacis and Venus perturb Hermaphroditus and Adonis by not enacting their “proper” roles in terms of courtship, and Leander is confused by Neptune’s sexual advances, naively telling him “You are deceav’d, I am no woman I” (676). These texts are without exception produced by young men, and often (though notably not the two most famous and influential examples of the genre by William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe) by young men at the Inns of Court, an environment which presumably fostered competitiveness and interest in erotic fictions.19 In the latter half of the sixteenth century, Thomas Lodge, John Marston, John

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Beaumont, Francis Beaumont, Richard Barnfield, William Barksted, and Thomas Edwards are all known to have either attended or are associated with one of the Inns. William Keach points out that “A tradition of Ovidian interest within this environment can be traced back to at least as early as the mid 1560s [...] Here, as in the universities, the informal activities of clever young men in an extremely orthodox setting led to an exploration of Ovidian eroticism and wit which must have had an aura of piquant anti-authoritarianism about it.”20 Ellis concurs, describing the Inns as: a crucial training ground in Elizabethan England for those with political aspirations. Ambitious young men of the kingdom came to the Inns, sometimes after studying at the universities, sometimes direct from the counties, to experience life in London and learn the common law. Not coincidentally, given their primary audience, the poems frequently retell myths concerning the transformation of youths such as Adonis, Narcissus, and Hermaphroditus. We have then in the epyllion a group of poems concerning the metamorphosis of young men, written by and for a group of young men at the centre of a culture and a nation that were rapidly changing.21 Ellis’s study of the epyllia argues strongly that, as these are texts by and for members of the Inns of Court, they are the literary manifestation of a cultural practice which promotes appropriate masculine qualities and knowledge for young men. As such, the epyllia may be seen as socially conservative. Whilst this claim is potentially undermined by the fact that the authors of the two leading examples, Shakespeare and Marlowe, are not part of this privileged group, the clique can be extended to include the universities, thus incorporating Marlowe’s experience and social contacts. Shakespeare remains removed; neither a student nor a lawyer and debatably, as an inhabitant of the cut-throat theatrical world and professional author, less interested in the development future civil servants. However, the place of Venus and Adonis within this reading of the epyllia lies in its dedication to and superficial aim in advising the young Henry Wriothesley (a graduate of Cambridge University and member of Gray’s Inn) in negotiating the homosocial yet hetereonormative ways of the world (an aim or process rather complicated by the ambivalence of Adonis’s

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character and fate). As such, this essay will focus on Shakespeare’s Adonis, Beaumont’s Hermaphroditus, Marlowe’s Leander, and Lodge’s early epyllion, Scillaes Metamorphosis (1589). Initially, however, let us consider another Ovidian text dedicated to the gentlemen at the Inns of court. Thomas Peend’s extended Ovidian translation The Pleasant Fable of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis (1565) is not an epyllion, but it exemplifies the painfully allegorical nature of contemporary moral readings of mythology, in this case specifically lecturing young male readers about the potential dangers awaiting them in the world beyond the observation and control of their guardians. It is relevant in this context because of the contrast between this version and the epyllion of Beaumont, and because it is also dedicated to those studying at the Inns of Court. To summarise: Hermaphroditus represents “such Youthes” that are “greene,” innocent and clean “from the spot of filthy luste” (342-3).22 Salmacis represents vice, and the Spring, pleasure (365-8). The innocent youth goes out into the world without a guide “And so, by pleasaunt shape of vyce / deceyved all unaware, / He drownes hym selfe in filthy sinne” (382-4). Once this happens, “A man is sayde to lose hym selfe … Enthrald in slavysh woe, he is / constrained for to yeilde / To lust” (398-402). Peend concludes We chaunge our nature cleane, being made effemynat. When we do yeeld to serve our lust, we lose our former state. (426-9) The inclusive “we” here is significant, opposing the implicit male author and reader with the female “other” and the dangerous effeminacy which results from lustful pleasure. This leads to the wider moral of Peend’s text, which concerns the inherent potential for sin found in women and how dangerously contagious it is to maturing masculinity. Similarly, in 1584 George Peele suggests that the myth informs us “Howe Salmacis resembling ydleness / Turns men to women all through wantoness.”23 Arthur Golding’s moralizing Epistle to his 1567 translation of Metamorphoses also summarizes thus: Hermaphrodite and Salmacis declare that idlenesse Is cheefest nurce and cherisher of all volupteousnesse

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And that voluptuous lyfe breedes sin: which linking all toogither Make men too bee effeminate, unwieldy, weake and lither [impotent].24 The epyllia’s focus on inexperienced youth dealing with their first stirrings of desire or finding themselves the object of such lust leads to the aforementioned potential to read such texts as instructive, though in a different way to Peend’s didacticism. Thomas Lodge entered the Inns as a student in 1578 and stayed for seventeen years as a “gentleman in chambers.” His Scillaes Metamorphosis of 1589 (credited with being the first epyllion) is dedicated “To His Especiall good friend Master Rafe Crane, and the rest of his most entire well willers, the Gentlemen of the Innes of Court and of Chauncerie.”25 It seems likely that Lodge’s poem was originally intended to be circulated privately amongst his friends at Lincoln’s Inn. As well as the dedication, the text contains witty allusions to life at Oxford University and parodies Petrarchan self-pity, the dominant literary mode of the lover for the previous decade or so. The narrator of the text complains to the demigod Glaucus of his misfortune in love (which is soon trumped by Glaucus), and their discussion of the nature of love and of the fickleness of women can be read as instructive for their supposed young male readers. However, as Nigel Alexander states, “The only person, according to the poem, really competent to give an account of ‘the course of all our plainings’” would be “he that hath seen the history of Venus and Adonis, Cephalus and Procris, the pangs of Lucina and Angelica the fair. Lodge’s ideal spectator is one familiar not only with Ovid but also the Italian epic.”26 Therefore, Lodge’s ideal reader is one who is aware both of the poems referred to and the intertextual relationship between such poems in the literary construction of love, desire, and complaint. To have this awareness the reader would, arguably, have to be a (male) product of a humanist education and be familiar with contemporary literature. The mockery of the rejected lover and his Petrarchan embodiment, and the parodying of such, is very clearly presented to the readers of Scillaes Metamorphosis; initially intended to be Lodge’s male contemporaries and friends at the Inns. Gregory Bredbeck suggests that “These poems are concerned not so much with erotic behaviour as with the implications of power and social order underpinning it”; this is expanded upon by Ellis to form “the re-imagining of citizenship according to a fraternal and contractual model.”27 As such,

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intertextual structures and the parody of existing forms are central both to the maturation of the male subject and to the homosocial environment of institutions of higher education. Lodge’s parody of Petrarchanism should not, however, be understood as conveying the same didactic tendency as Peend. The epyllia are written by very young men (Beaumont, for example, was all of eighteen when he completed Salmacis and Hermaphroditus) for and about their social group. They mock the inexperienced and intellectually unfashionable, but this is largely the mockery of their peer group (i.e., an eighteen-year-old advising a fifteen-year-old), not, as in the case of Peend, an authoritative older male moralizing to his juniors. We could argue that Shakespeare’s position, as a social inferior to his addressee, is potentially analogous (or potentially ambivalent). In relation to the epyllia, the subversive potential of parody should be noted: parody “typically attacks the official word, mocks the pretensions of authoritative discourse, and undermines the seriousness with which subordinates should approach the justifications of their betters.”28 The epyllia answer back to the moralized Ovid and Petrarchan tradition of the previous generation, though the lessons therein are slippery. In Scillaes Metamorphosis, Glaucus ironically advises the narrator, and his readers, to: With secret eye looke on the earth a while,  Regard the changes Nature forceth there;  Behold the heauens, whose course all sence beguile;  Respect thy selfe, and thou shalt find it cleere,  That infantlike thou art become a youth,  And youth forespent a wretched age ensu’th.  In searching then the schoolemens cunning noates,  Of heauen, of earth, of flowers, of springing trees,  Of hearbs, of mettall, and of Thetis floates,  Of lawes and nurture kept among the Bees:  Conclude and knowe times change by course of fate,  Then mourne no more, but moane my haples state.  (31-42) The narrator/reader is not to spend his time in mourning over the responsibilities of becoming “a youth,” with the pressure of knowing

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that a youth “forespent,” i.e., wasted, “a wretched age ensu’th.” They are advised to observe Nature and the heavens, like good, rational men, and to consult “schoolemens cunning noates” in their education, safe in the knowledge that “times change by course of fate.” The urge to “respect thyself” is contrasted with or undermined ironically by the end point of this sage advice, to instead mourn Glaucus’s “haples state” in his lovesickness. Through the experience of the narrator and Glaucus, the reader also learns about the pains of unrequited love and the fickleness of women, as well as the pointlessness and unfashionable status of Petrarchan posturing. As Ellis writes, “While Petrarchan poetry contains within itself anti-Petrarchan sentiments, the epyllion tends to ignore this complexity and characterizes the Petrarchan poet as idealistic, self-deluded and immature.”29 The figure of Glaucus demonstrates the potential to overcome the Petrarchan model, as well as the triumph of doing so. Glaucus and the narrator’s initial dejection parody Petrarchan convention as the male subject suffering from the unrequited love of a cruel yet idolized mistress, bemoaning their state, and writing love poetry about the experience. The narrator is “alone,” “full of grief,” “Weeping my wants and wailing scant relief, / Wringing mine arms” (1-4). Glaucus is comparably at the mercy of “cruel Silla,” and tells his story tearfully with his head on the narrator’s knee. As Ellis suggests, such Petrarchism in many epyllia is associated with immaturity. Glaucus’s cure leads him, essentially, to stop talking and start acting on alternative desires, and is “both sudden and hilariously phallic” as he rises up and “shakes his bushy crest” (550).30 Venus and Adonis similarly undermines Petrarchan convention via a sustained inversion of its tropes and an assertion of its techniques as impotent. However, the advice it offers for maturing young men is characteristically ambiguous. The argument for procreation which Venus puts forward (157-74; 751-68) as a reason to embrace desire is one side of the advice offered in the text, supported by the existence of the same argument in the author’s sonnets. Venus urges, “Seeds spring from seeds, and beauty breedeth beauty: / Thou wast begot; to get it is thy duty” (167-8); “By law of nature thou art bound to breed, / That thine may live when thou thyself art dead;” (171-2) and accusingly states that “Things growing to themselves” (166) are both unnatural and narcissistic.31 Adonis’s response, that he is too young to be sexually active with Venus, and doing so would ruin him, is the contrasting argument, supported by the reader’s awareness of

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Venus’s desperation (her overemphasis on the procreation argument leads Adonis to call it an “over handled theme” [770]) and lust, and the potentially fatal trouble it can get characters into (as in the implicit presence of the Metamorphoses and the references to Adonis’s mother’s fate). Adonis’s youth, of course, is stressed, as Shakespeare’s creative addition to the myth. Both Adonis and Venus refer to him being “unripe” (128; 524), and his listing of analogous states of prematurity continues in his counterargument: Who wears a garment shapeless and unfinished? Who plucks the bud before one leaf put forth? If springing things be any jot diminished, They wither in their prime, prove nothing worth. The colt that’s backed and burdened being young, Loseth his pride, and never waxeth strong. (415-20) This argument echoes Lodge’s narrator’s claim that “forespending” youth will lead to “wretchedness,” but is arguably undermined by Adonis’s death after choosing the hunt over “love,” in that this course of action does not seem to be the correct one either. However, the hunt for the boar, a creature often used to symbolise masculinity in the period, can be figured as a pursuit of mature masculinity.32 Adonis’s failure here could be further evidence that he is not ready for this activity, just as he is not ready for sexual relationships with goddesses. Adonis’s sexualized death, as the boar penetrates his groin with his phallic tusk, “Sheathed unaware the tusk in his soft groin” (1116), furthers this implication and retains Adonis’s feminized position in the text. What the nineteen-year-old Wriothesley, with “the world’s hopeful expectation” (Dedication) weighing upon him (implicitly rather too lightly) was to make of this is unclear; perhaps his literary training in the genre would help him to decide that he, unlike Adonis, is ready to take on a man’s responsibility in the real world. As m ­ entioned previously, Wriothesley was both a Cambridge graduate and a member of the Inns, so should have been equipped with the intellectual training to appreciate the implications of the intertexts of the poem. The inexperienced youths in the Ovidian epyllia are, without exception, very beautiful (for example, Leander, Adonis, Hermaphroditus, Paris), sporting the conventional and youthful effeminate beauty of

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the period in their blonde hair, hairless white skin, and red cheeks and lips.33 As such they are depicted as being more at risk of attracting unwanted attention or desire, and the celebration of young male beauty therefore is tempered by a recognition of its attendant risks. This does nothing to reduce the desirability of the boys in the texts, however, and the lingering descriptions of bodies, faces, and desires evidence the established homoerotic tendency of the leading examples of these texts. In contrast, there is in many of the texts an unsubtle wariness of women, especially older or dominant ones (for example, Venus and Salmacis). There is also a tendency to revile or punish female characters who offend the male protagonists (Scylla, Salmacis). This tension between a culturally prescribed heteronormativity and a clear social preference for males (if not by the poems’ protagonists, then certainly as implied by the poems’ narrators) speaks for the alleged superiority of homosocial social structures. Shakespeare’s Venus, rather than embodying divine sexual desire, is desperate and sweatily corporeal. At best she is intimidating, in her physical strength and tenacity, and at worst laughable. Adonis also identifies the “abuse” of reason in her attempts to persuade him that it is natural and logical to engage in sexual relations with her: “You do it for increase – O strange excuse, / When reason is the bawd to lust’s abuse!” (791-2). The exclusion of women from the hallowed educational focus on rhetoric may be seen in this failure of Venus to persuade. Rhetoric, a skill derived from masculine education and a central component of legal training, surfaces repeatedly in the epyllia; in Leander’s maid-deceiving persuasion, for example (line 338), and in the many instances of attempted seduction. Adonis’s lack of maturity is further evidenced by how long it takes him to offer a rational argument in response to Venus, as well as his feminized position on the receiving end of persuasive rhetoric. For a great deal of the narrative, Adonis is silent, “louring” (183) and fretting. As Ellis writes, “if Adonis is to become a man, he must reject the position of object of desire ... It is only when Adonis has begun to learn rhetoric that he can break out of Venus’s arms, and reject the form of desire that she represents.”34 Silence conveys powerlessness and one’s position as object rather than originator of speech. Once he does speak more than a few lines, Adonis’s resistance to female persuasion is determined: If love had lent you twenty thousand tongues, And every tongue more moving than your own, Bewitching like the wanton mermaid’s songs,

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Yet from mine ear the tempting tune is blown; For know, my heart stands armed in mine ear, And will not let a false sound enter there, Lest the deceiving harmony should run Into the quiet closure of my breast, And then my little heart were quite undone, In his bedchamber to be barred of rest. (775-84) Notably, Venus’s attempted persuasion is not given the status of rhetoric. Her words are characterized by Adonis as dishonest, “bewitching,” “wanton,” like that of the legendary destructive, deceptive, and ­monstrous mermaids, “false,” and invasive. Similarly, Beaumont’s Hermaphroditus is described as being constantly pestered by women drawn to his beauty. He is persecuted by nymphs pulling out his hair, stealing his clothes, and being kissed by goddesses: So wondrous fair he was, that (as they say)  Diana being hunting on a day,  She saw the boy upon a green bank lay him,  And there the virgin huntress meant to slay him;  Because no nymphs would now pursue the chase,  For all were struck blind with the wanton’s face. (19-24)35 This conveys perhaps the danger of adult, powerful women to the beautiful youth, who is characterized as “wanton” based purely on the effect he has on others. The narrator continues, She bent her bow, and loosed it straight again:  Then she began to chide her wanton eye,  And fain would shoot, but durst not see him die.  She turn’d and shot, but did of purpose miss him,  She turn’d again, and did of purpose kiss him.  Then the boy ran: for (some say) had he stayed,  Diana had no longer been a maid.  (28-36) Diana cannot kill Hermaphroditus because of his beauty, which is of such strength that his “wantoness” is infectious, seen in “her wanton

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eye” and her compulsion to kiss him. The history related in the poem conveys that these experiences are no more than inconvenient until Hermaphroditus meets Salmacis, whose advances are also unwanted and rejected. Hermaphroditus’ lack of response is presented as anomalous to his masculine status, as he doesn’t appear to want “That which all men of maidens ought to crave” (728), suggesting perhaps that he is not yet a man but is, like Adonis, immature, and ultimately the victim of tragic consequences. This cue also suggests that Hermaphroditus is in a similarly effeminized position to Adonis as he fends off the physical and verbal advances of Salmacis. Here, we see the position of the object of desire as effeminized despite that subject’s biological sex; to be the object of desire is to be “other” to the desiring subject, implicitly, in this case, the mature male reader. Though the transformation of Hermaphroditus into a hermaphrodite is seen as an almost tragic diminishing of his masculinity in Beaumont’s text (and contemporary moral allegory), Salmacis, the overly forward and lascivious nymph, disappears entirely, both textually and physically. Despite Beaumont’s image of mutual transformation, and his insistence that in the new body “Nor man nor maid now could they be esteem’d, / Neither and either might they well be deem’d,” Hermaphroditus is still referred to as “the young boy” (905-8). Ellis reads the loss of self in Hermaphroditus as essentially the failure to achieve mature masculinity in a homosocial environment, following the standard moralized version described previously.36 Beaumont’s version is more playfully ambiguous than this suggests, however; although the feminine figure of Salmacis disappears, the narrator seems rather keen on the magical proliferation of effeminate boys from the enchanted spring, as stated in “The Author to the Reader” preceding the poem: “I hope my poem is so lively writ, / That thou wilt turn half-maid with reading it” (9-10). Femininity is more firmly ejected from Lodge’s Scillaes Metamorphosis. The fate of Scilla in Lodge’s poem can be read as the revenge fantasy of a spurned lover. She is compelled to love Glaucus after he has been freed of his desire for her (both have been enchanted by Cupid) and consigned to torment in a cave.37 This is presented, by Lodge, as a moral tale: “With Scilla in the rockes to make your biding / A cursed plague, for womens proud back-sliding” (785-6). Ellis highlights the amount of male weeping in the text, and notes that all the precedents that Glaucus gives of his lovesick situation are (weeping) females: “Glaucus’s Petrarchan rhetoric is thus implicitly connected with womanliness,” as is his emotional and verbal incontinence.38

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This undesirable and immature “femininity” is cast off, and the punishment of Scilla ultimately rejects the Petrarchan model of submission to the mistress and instead makes her suffer pain for her pride and refusal to love. This rejection of femininity in various ways in these texts is complicated by their celebration of the effeminate beauty of the young protagonists. The idolization of young male beauty and, in some cases, their resistance to female lovers, arguably comprises a homoerotic subtext, well commented on critically. Adonis, described as “Stain to all nymphs, more lovely than a man” (9), eclipses both women and grown men in his beauty. The “maiden burning of his cheeks” (50) emphasizes his youthful androgyny – he is like a maiden but also is a maiden in that he is a virgin. Marlowe’s Leander is similarly andro­ gynous, attractive to men (who may or may not think he is a girl), and the subject of lengthy homoerotic interest to the narrator of the text, making him, like Adonis, a subject of the male reader’s gaze.39 Hermaphroditus is described with the same lexis as Salmacis, as Keach writes, “Beaumont heightens the sense of a similar bisexual beauty which unites Salmacis and Hermaphroditus descriptively and metaphorically long before they are united physically and literally.”40 Though his text is imitative and intertextual to the point of plagiarism, Drayton’s Endimion is also wooed by mature male figures unclear as to his sex, Ioue oft-times bent to lasciuious sport, And comming where Endimion did resort, Hath courted him, inflamed with desire, Thinking some Nymph was cloth’d in boyes attire.” (93-6) These characters are objectified as much as the female bodies which often receive equal interest. As Bruce R. Smith writes, “figures like Leander, Adonis, and Hermaphroditus embody, quite literally, the ambiguities of sexual desire in English Renaissance culture and the ambivalences of homosexual desire in particular. They represent, not an exclusive sexual taste, but an inclusive one.”41 Homoerotic interaction in the action of the texts supports this argument. Beaumont’s narrator relates how Phoebus “doated” on Hermaphroditus’s “roseate face” and often “dallied” with him (35). “Dallying” suggests that Hermaphroditus is rather more involved in

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this interaction than with, for example, his bizarre experience with Diana. Though the sexual implications of “dallying” are dubious, Phoebus’s mythological history details several sexual relationships with young boys. Marlowe is more explicit, having a lustful Neptune exploring Leander’s body in the sea: At every stroke, betwixt them [Leander’s arms] he would slide, And steale a kisse ... And as he turnd, cast many a lustfull glaunce, ... And dive into the water, and there prie Upon his brest, his thighs, and everie limb. (668-73). Despite these examples, Ellis tends to read the epyllia as determinedly heterosexual, suggesting that “the epyllion invents, through its reinterpretation of Ovidian mythical narratives, a new version of heterosexuality.”42 This is qualified as more of a political relation than an erotic one, but sexual desire in the epyllia is more ambivalent and inclusive than this. The above readings convey a wariness of women, an avoidance of Petrarchan submission, and consciousness of the attractiveness of young men as well as the potential danger of finding oneself an object of desire. But regarding female characters, the wariness is rather aimed at women who do not behave in ways considered appropriate to culturally approved gender roles, those who are dominant, vocal, and sexually suggestive. In addition, the attractiveness of young men, in the epyllia as a whole, is not at the expense of the attractiveness of female characters. The aim and marker of mature masculinity is to be the one in the relative position of power and control, to be the one desiring and (successfully) seducing. The division is not between male and female (and whichever is found to be sexually attractive), but between the desirer and the desired, the former being the rightful position of the mature male. Furthermore, if not overtly homoerotic as a genre, in their resolutely heteronormative central pairings, then the epyllia are certainly homosocial. Lodge presents male solidarity in love-sickness or poor treatment by women, with Venus herself praising Glaucus’s fidelity. Adonis’s preference for the masculine sport of hunting with friends over “love” (“Rose-cheeked Adonis hied him to the chase. / Hunting he loved, but love he laughed to scorn.” [3-4]) or sparring with Venus (“He

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tells her no, tomorrow he intends / To hunt the boar with certain of his friends.” [587-8]; “‘I am,’ quoth he, ‘expected of my friends,’” [718]) prioritizes the homosocial over the heterosexual. The tragic irony of Adonis’s preference for the masculine pursuit of hunting is that he fails at the rite of passage. Adonis’s pursuit of the boar is the choice he makes in favour of masculine homosocial activity, the irony being that this is ultimately emasculating through metaphorical rape and/or castration. Beaumont’s Hermaphroditus is comparably feminized through the actions of a lustful woman for, it seems, the titillation of the male reader, and Marlowe’s Leander, though resolutely heterosexual, is offered to the (male) reader by an implicitly male narrator dedicated to presenting and describing the naked body of this beautiful young man as an object of desire. Cultural codes of masculinity are thereby transmitted and perpetuated through a particularly intertextual and parodic genre: epyllia. The narratives of the epyllia are recast via creative imitation to reinforce certain ideological norms concerning appropriate gendered courtship roles and power differentiation in sexual relationships (both with women and young men) of a masculine subject: “the genre attempts to install a new version of (literary) sexual relations.”43 These are expressed in playful, codified language in, originally, a coterie environment, which parodies earlier conventions of literary expressions of desire in order to construct and assert an alternative model of mature masculinity. The intertextual nature of the genre functions as part of a cultural milieu perpetuating the values expressed, and these are values that privileged men benefit from: homosocial cultural structures which place them in positions of agency and influence. Any moral guidance to be found in the epyllia is pedagogical; that is, mature masculinity is asserted as being achieved by one who has the ability to rewrite (and to understand) Ovidian poetry and mythology, informed by surrounding intertexts, in order to to perpetuate the cultural interests of his own time.

Not e s   1 See Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of TwentiethCentury Art Forms (London: Methuen, 1985); Margaret A. Rose, Parody: Ancient, Modern, and Post-modern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). As Rose writes: “some modern and postmodern theorists

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will be seen to have developed new criteria such as intertextuality from examples of general parody” (2).  2 Rose, Parody, 185.   3 Simon Dentith, Parody (London: Routledge, 2000), 10.   4 Ibid., 10.   5 Ibid., 11 (my emphasis).  6 Rose, Parody, 37.   7 Ibid., 178. “It is necessary to make this point not only because some other editors and commentators on Bakhtin since Kristeva have continued to underplay the role of parody in his theories – and have either left it out of their indices or misinterpreted it as negative, parasitic, or trivial – but because several other late-modern commentators on parodic intertextuality have reduced parody to the intertextual by denying or overlooking the comic aspects of parody” (Rose, Parody, 180).  8 Rose, Parody, 10. The term is rare in early modern texts.  9 Dentith, Parody, 2, 6, 9. 10 Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, 19, 22. See the work of Michael Riffaterre and Roland Barthes on the role of the reader and authorial intent. 11 Sir Walter Raleigh, “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd’ (1600); Anon., “Come live with me and be my deer” (1600); John Donne, “The Bait” (1633). 12 Dentith, Parody, 5. 13 John Florio, A worlde of wordes, or Most copious, and exact dictionarie in Italian and English (London: Arnold Hatfield for Edw[ard] Blount, 1598), cited by Rose, Parody, 10. 14 Dentith, Parody, 29 (my emphasis). 15 Jim Ellis, Sexuality and Citizenship: Metamorphosis in Elizabethan Erotic Verse (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 5. 16 Examples of more “overt” intertextuality include Thomas Edwards’ Narcissus (1595) and his Cephalus and Procris (1595), Thomas Heywood’s Oenone and Paris (1594), and other epyllia by Michael Drayton, John Weever, and Dunstan Gale being heavily influenced by Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1593). 17 William Keach, Elizabethan Erotic Narratives: Irony and Pathos in the Ovidian Poetry of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Their Contemporaries (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1977), xv. 18 Ellis, Sexuality and Citizenship, 6. 19 See Thomas Lodge, Scillaes Metamorphosis (1589); Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis (1593); Heywood, Oenone and Paris (1594); Edwards, Cephalus and Procris and Narcissus (1595); Drayton,

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Endymion and Phoebe (1595); Dunstan Gale, Pyramus and Thisbe (1596); Marlowe, Hero and Leander (1598); Francis Beaumont, Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (1602). 20 Keach, Elizabethan Erotic Narratives, 32. Keach refers here to George Turberville’s translation of the Heroides in the 1560s, and we can add Thomas Peend’s extended translation of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (1565). Both Keach and Ellis cite Philip Finkelpearl’s John Marston of the Middle Temple: An Elizabethan Dramatist in His Social Setting (Cambridge, M A: Harvard University Press, 1969): Finkelpearl reconstructs an “inbred milieu of young men, mostly wealthy, whose orthodox ideas and ambitions mingled easily with licentious conduct (or the pretense of it) and whose fashions in clothes and literature were picked up and discarded overnight” (61). 21 Ellis, Sexuality and Citizenship, 3. 22 Thomas Peend, The pleasant fable of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis (London: Thomas Col[well], 1565). Subsequent references in parentheses. 23 George Peele, The araygnement of Paris (London: Henry Marsh, 1584), 1.5.29-30, Biiv. 24 Ovid’s Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation of 1567, ed. John Frederick Nims (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2000), 408. See also George Sandys’s 1632 translation of Metamorphoses, which contains the same conclusion. Needless to say, this moral is absent in Ovid’s text. 25 Thomas Lodge, Scillaes metamorphosis (London: Richard Jones, 1589). Subsequent references in parentheses. 26 Nigel Alexander, ed. Elizabethan Narrative Verse (London: Edward Arnold, 1967), 10. 27 Gregory W. Bredbeck, Sodomy and Interpretation: Marlowe to Milton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 118; Ellis, Sexuality and Citizenship, 4. 28 Dentith, Parody, 20. 29 Ellis, Sexuality and Citizenship, 6. 30 Ibid., 57. 31 William Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis (1593) in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (London: W.W. Norton and Co., 1997), 607–34. Subsequent references are given in parentheses. 32 See A.T. Hatto, “Venus and Adonis: and the Boar,” MLR 41.4 (October 1946): 355–6, 353–61; Oberon hopes a boar will appear to Titania, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, II.ii.36; Aaron describes himself as “the chafed boar” in Titus Andronicus, IV.ii.137; and Giacomo is ­compared to “a full-acorned boar” in Cymbeline, II.v.16.

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33 Drayton’s Endimion, unusually, is dark-haired and, though a “boy” is also “manly”: “His tresses, of the Rauens shyning black, / Stragling in curles along his manly back.” (146-7) 34 Ellis, Sexuality and Citizenship, 87. 35 Beaumont, Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (1602), in The Works of Beaumont and Fletcher, vol. 2, ed. George Danley (London: Routledge, 1872), 694–701. Subsequent references in parentheses. 36 Ellis, Sexuality and Citizenship, 48–51; 145–65. 37 In the Ovidian version she is, of course, transformed into a monster. 38 Ellis, Sexuality and Citizenship, 56. 39 See A.D. Cousins, “Towards a Reconsideration of Shakespeare’s Adonis: Rhetoric, Narcissus, and the Male Gaze,” Studia Neophilologica 68:2 (1996), 195–204. 40 Keach, Elizabethan Erotic Narratives, 201. 41 Bruce R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A Cultural Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 136. 42 Ellis, Sexuality and Citizenship, 4. 43 Ibid., 7.

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P art Fou r The Body and Religion

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11 The Uncooked Goose: Ovid’s Philemon, Milton’s Adam, and the Transformation of Hospitable Manliness Eric B. Song

In Paradise Lost, John Milton claims to describe the nature of masculinity as God originally intended it.1 When Adam appears in Book 4, the narrator calls him “our first father”; the next book labels him “our primitive great sire.”2 The expectation of becoming the original patriarch seems central to Adamic manhood. After the Fall, however, the angel Michael teaches Adam that he has lost his seat of “preeminence” as the “great progenitor” (11.346-7). By the end of the poem, Adam is identified less as our collective father and more as a husband who walks “hand in hand” with his wife (12.648). There should have been no contradiction between the status of a father and that of a husband; in Milton’s Protestant outlook, marriage was instituted not only to regulate reproduction but also to provide spiritual companionship. Yet Milton redefines Adamic manhood by privileging love over patrilineal descent. This redefinition facilitates Milton’s attempt to alter the values of classical epic. More specifically, Milton’s redefinition of masculinity inverts the paradigm of virtus established by the Aeneid. Virgil’s hero starts by fleeing Troy with his father and son while allowing his wife Creusa to trail behind until she is lost. Aeneas must subsequently resist the new love of Dido so that he can fulfill his calling. His true destiny involves a political rather than companionate marriage, one that will establish him as the progenitor of an empire.3 In Paradise Lost, the intensity of Adam’s attachment to Eve is a vehicle of the Fall. Yet the Fall may be salutary insofar as it emphasizes that God’s eternal kingdom and fatherhood – not man’s

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– should be the subject of Christian epic. Adam’s status as patriarch is diminished, but the poem ends with the hope that loving marriage will be the grounds of a redeemed masculinity. Milton’s epic promotes conjugal love as a key feature of masculine heroism even when that love undermines the pre-eminence of patriarchal descent – at least within the human plane of the narrative. This chapter argues that Ovid’s story of Philemon and Baucis functions as a singularly important precedent for Milton’s redefinition of masculinity. Although Paradise Lost does not allude explicitly to Philemon and Baucis, Ovid’s uncharacteristically happy story lies at the center of the criss-crossings – between biblical and classical narratives, between the Hebrew Bible and its Christian reinterpretation – through which Milton advances an understanding of manhood defined by conjugal love. At play is the dynamic linking sacrifice, gender hierarchy, and reproduction within a typological reading of Genesis. My focus on the Philemon and Baucis story offers an alternate way of tracing Ovid’s influence on early modern English thinking about gender, sex, and masculinity. Much of the scholarship on this topic is anchored upon the contradiction between the prestige conferred upon Ovid by Renaissance humanism, on the one hand, and Ovid’s seeming lewdness or subversiveness, on the other. This bifurcation poses an interpretive challenge for Christian readers while also offering a poetic resource for expressing the entanglements of erotic desire, gendered bodies, and subjectivity.4 In my argument, Ovidian poetry does not function primarily as the vocabulary of a productively troubling carnality but rather locates a theological tension within Milton’s view of Adamic manhood as it relates to Christian salvation. In a fallen world, the mandate to reproduce is redefined so that it anticipates the promised birth of a Son who must be sacrificed. This is a challenging or even displeasing fact in Milton’s religious imagination, but Ovidian poetry offers a partial workaround. The Philemon and Baucis episode provides an instance in which domestic harmony without sacrificial bloodshed satisfies the gods, who reward the couple with a form of shared immortality. Even if Milton cannot adhere to this precedent – as loving marriage cannot fully circumvent the necessity of atonement in Milton’s Christian worldview – it brings into sharper focus the way that Paradise Lost redefines Adamic manhood by aligning patriarchal standing with an outmoded form of sacrifice. Hospitality serves as the narrative point of contact between Milton’s presentation of Adam and Eve and the story of Philemon and Baucis.

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Charles Martindale calls Ovid’s story “[t]he locus classicus … for a poetic theoxenia,” the motif of humans entertaining gods visiting in disguise.5 Martindale quotes Ovid’s seventeenth-century translator George Sandys to suggest why the story is a model for Milton’s depiction of Adam and Eve as host and hostess; Philemon and Baucis represent “‘the patternes of chast and constant coniugall affections.’”6 Hospitality also serves as a conceptual linchpin between domestic and political values – across classical, Hebraic, and Christian worldviews. A well-known etymological twist captures the complications involved in the seemingly universal exhortation to welcome strangers into the household: hospes, which can refer to either the host or the guest in Latin, derives from hostis, or enemy. If hospitality promises reciprocation between host and guest (both are hospites), that reciprocity emerges out of the potential of enmity. Paradoxically, hospitality can only exist if one party can initially be marked as an outsider. This configuration of inclusion and exclusion bears upon an intergenerational future. As Jacques Derrida puts it, the “contract of hospitality that links to the foreigner” raises the “question of knowing whether it counts beyond the individual and if it also extends to the family, to the generation, to the genealogy.”7 This intergenerational dynamic confers upon the political negotiation already involved in the act of hospitality a lasting significance. Milton, as Swen Voekel reminds us, “places at the very center of his epic a hospitality scene.”8 When Raphael approaches, Adam and Eve know no reason to fear; Adam quickly identifies their “guest” as a “heavenly stranger” (5.313-16). Yet the ensuing hospitality scene, I argue, foreshadows the Fall and its effects on Adam’s relationship to his progeny. My chapter focuses more specifically on the role of food preparation within biblical and epic accounts of hospitality. When Milton’s Adam commissions Eve to prepare a meal, he reveals an ignorance about food preparation and does not participate. This gendered division would seem to be a back-projection of Milton’s attitudes about domestic labour. Yet even as an expression of biases, this depiction contrasts with epic and biblical accounts of hospitality. Milton’s Adam is unlike other hospitable men who not only command others but also take part in cooking – specifically the butchering of animals – when strangers arrive. Welcoming strangers is a dangerous affair, and the roasting of meat is aligned with sacrificial rites through which men seek propitious futures for their households.9 For Adam, the absence of meat, fire, and sacrifice should merely be a sign of

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innocence. Yet Milton’s description of the vegetarian meal that Eve prepares, I argue, already anticipates the attenuation of fatherhood as the defining trait of man. Within such overlapping contexts, Ovid’s story of Philemon and Baucis emerges as a distinctive precedent. This story distinguishes hospitable cookery from sacrifice and suspends the need for the latter. Philemon carves meat for Jove and Mercury while his wife prepares the rest of the meal. When Philemon and Baucis suspect the identities of their guests, they attempt to add the sacrifice of a goose but the gods stop them. Sacrifice may prove unnecessary because Philemon and Baucis have no intergenerational future to secure. As an old couple who constitute their entire household, Philemon and Baucis’s only concern is their shared life and death. In this exceptional case, the co-operation of husband and wife is sufficient to satisfy the gods. This story – and its interlacing with epic and biblical narratives – helps us to discern how Milton’s promotion of married love challenges existing patriarchal values. Unlike Philemon and Baucis, Adam and Eve do have a reproductive future, one that will advance redemptive history. Yet in Paradise Lost as in the protoevangelium, the Son of God is prophesied specifically as the woman’s seed. This postlapsarian rationale for reproduction undercuts the preeminence of Adamic fatherhood. Whereas Philemon and Baucis’s conjugal love makes hospitality alone sufficient, the redemptive future that reunites Adam and Eve will require sacrifice. Yet Milton’s presentation of hospitality already signals an impulse to draw attention away from sacrifice, at least as a human endeavour. Because the link between an intergenerational future and sacrifice is a mystery for God and his Son to resolve, Milton’s Adam and Eve are free to make conjugal love the beginning of postlapsarian life – to commence where Philemon and Baucis’s narrative ends.

1 For Christian readers, the story of Philemon and Baucis accommodates syncretic interpretations that, in turn, facilitate a typological reading of the Hebrew Bible. Of particular importance is the pattern of similarities and differences between the story of Philemon and Baucis and the paradigmatic account of hospitality in the Hebrew Bible – that of Abraham and Sarah entertaining angels. As the English Calvinist John Edwards observes in a late seventeenth-century treatise,

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It is not improbable that Abraham’s Feasting the Angels, yea, the Son of God himself (Gen. 18.8.), gave occasion to the Poets to speak of the Gods being feasted by Mortals, as they tell us of Philemon and Baucis, their entertaining of Iupiter and Mercury; which his but a corrupt Representation of Abraham and Sarah’s Treating their Heavenly Guests.10

The Ovidian story is deemed “corrupt” not only because it speaks of pagan deities, but also because Philemon and Baucis only partly resemble Abraham and Sarah. Both are aged couples, but only one has a reproductive future that can be reinterpreted as leading to a higher Christian truth. The story of Abraham and Sarah being visited by three mysterious visitors on the plains of Mamre underwrites the command to be hospitable found in the epistle to the Hebrews: “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares” (Heb. 13:2).11 The Christian exhortation emphasizes the positive aspects of the uncertainty involved in welcoming strangers. In Genesis, this uncertainty is the basis of an irony concerning Abraham and Sarah’s progeny. When Sarah overhears the visitor (suddenly described in the singular) declaring that she will bear a son, she laughs in disbelief. The narrative describes Yahweh himself demanding of Abraham, “Wherefore did Sarah laugh?” (Gen. 18:13). Yahweh’s presence manifests itself as a response to Sarah’s disbelief. The angelic identity of the visitors and the divine truth that they speak are fully confirmed when Sarah gives birth to Isaac. This configuration of knowledge, irony, and reproduction clarifies the significance of hospitable cookery. Abraham tells his visitors that he will “fetch a morsel of bread” but then gives Sarah instructions to prepare “three measures of fine meal” and to “make cakes upon the hearth” (Gen. 18:5-6). If bread is a foodstuff that the husband claims 328 to present through the labour of his wife, meat remains more squarely within the domain of male cookery. The task of preparing an animal is divided between Abraham and a young man: “And Abraham ran tender and good, and gave it unto a young man; and he hasted to dress it. unto the herd, and fetcht a calf tender and good, and gave it unto a young and he and hasted dress them” it. And(Gen. he took butter, and milk, nd milk, and the calf which heman; had dressed, set ittobefore and the calf which he had dressed, and set it before them” (Gen. 18:7‑8). rapid attention transfer away of agency in preparing the calf draws nsfer of agency in preparing theThe calf draws from its attention away from its butchering. This fact is merely implied, and is merely implied, andthe the word word (ʤ ‘asah) used to describe ( ड़ʕˈ ʕˆ,, ‘asah) describe the thedressed dressed calf describes “making” rather than killing. The opening chapters of Genesis repeatedly g” rather than killing. The opening chapters of Genesis repeatedly uses the

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will discover that knowledge of the divine in relation to the future requires

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uses the same word to describe creation. Cooking is thus aligned with life-giving rather than death. Yet Abraham will discover that knowledge of the divine in relation to the future requires sacrificial killing. When Yahweh tests Abraham with the command to kill Isaac, Abraham seems fully prepared to commit the act with his own hands. Abraham does tell Isaac, “God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering,” but it remains unclear whether he is expressing a sincere conviction or lying to assuage his son (Gen. 22:8). By providing a ram rather than a lamb to be sacrificed in Isaac’s stead, God affirms Abraham’s hope while also proving him partly incorrect. The ensuing sacrifice alters the terms of the earlier hospitality scene. Whereas the uncertainty surrounding the mysterious guests had become the basis of Sarah’s doubt, the uncertainty surrounding Abraham concerns the basis of his extreme willingness to obey God. The earlier episode had drawn attention away from the killing of the calf while splitting Abraham’s agency in butchery. When Abraham does kill an animal by himself, he is not acting as a host who orders a meal but is rather returning a sacrifice that God has provided. Abraham, in other words, learns that he can merely kill whereas God is capable of generating life. Sacrifice affirms God’s prerogative in creating Abraham’s lineage – an affirmation that takes place between God, father, and son, at a remove from the once doubting mother.12 Edwards’s comparison underscores what is absent in Philemon and Baucis’s hospitality: a sacrifice that secures an intergenerational future. When Edwards proclaims that the Son of God himself was truly present at Mamre, he gestures toward a typological understanding whereby the sacrifice that redeems Isaac looks ahead to Christ’s death. Within the New Testament, the typological redefinition of Abraham’s story works to affiliate God and patriarch. In the epistle to the Romans, Paul contrasts Abraham’s faith with Sarah’s doubt: “And being not weak in faith, he considered not his own body now dead, when he was about an hundred years old, neither yet the deadness of Sarah’s womb: he staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief” (Rom. 4:19-20). Paul works to transform the basic uncertainty surrounding the legitimacy of any father into a forward-looking faith that belongs properly to the patriarch rather than the matriarch. Reading against the grain of Pauline teaching, Tracy McNulty has attempted to recuperate Sarah’s role – not only as a belated mother but also as a hostess. “Sarah and Abraham,” McNulty argues, “must be understood not as two distinct subjects … but as representatives

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in displaced form of the conflicting tendencies of a single – albeit divided – subject of hospitality.”13 In this account, Sarah’s laughter is not a failing but rather an expression of the uncertainty involved in welcoming strangers; even if only Sarah is described as laughing, Abraham participates in her doubt. Yet the hospitality scene defines more precisely when Abraham and Sarah can be a single subject and when they are divided hierarchically. Abraham can speak of his wife’s preparation of grains as his own offering, yet cooking meat is an act to be performed by men. Meat cookery, in turn, anticipates the sacrifice that clarifies Abraham’s more exclusive relationship with God as the patriarch of Israel and, eventually, a spiritual forebear for Christians.

2 From the viewpoint of a Christian reader like John Edwards, the Philemon and Baucis story is imperfect precisely to the extent that it depicts hospitality as rendering sacrifice unnecessary. Yet this episode is not straightforwardly or consistently deemed “corrupt” but rather retains its appeal for writers seeking to harmonize classical values with Christian ones. Whereas hospitality in the Hebrew Bible provides an occasion for typological reinterpretation, classical hospitality allows Christian writers to point to an underlying universal truth. “For hospitality is a catholick vertue,” remarks Caleb Dalechamp in Christian Hospitalitie (1632), “having been practiced in all places, at all times, and by all sorts of people, as Calvin truly affirms upon the 18 of Genesis.”14 Dalechamp notes that the principle of theoxenia is taught by “Eumaus in Homer,” referring to book 14 of the Odyssey.15 Although the swineherd Eumaus invokes theoxenia as his rationale, he does not entertain a god.16 Rather, Eumaus unwittingly entertains his own master, Odysseus, who has arrived home unrecognized.17 Dalechamp’s allusion to Eumaus makes it all the more suggestive that he does not even mention Virgil. Book 8 of the Aeneid features another instance in which a visitor who receives hospitality turns out not to be a god but rather the epic hero. When Aeneas arrives in Italy, Evander and his son Pallas are overseeing a rite of homage to Hercules. The hospitable meal offered to Aeneas features not only the chine of an ox but also lustralibus extis, which would seem to denote sacrificial entrails (8.183).18 Presumably, Dalechamp does not cite this Virgilian example because Evander’s dutiful hospitality is not rewarded. Sacrificial cookery does not safeguard Evander’s progeny from the dangers inherent

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in hospitality; the death of Evander’s son Pallas will play a significant role in the ensuing story of Aeneas fulfilling his destiny of becoming the progenitor of Rome.19 Rather than citing Virgil, Dalechamp affiliates Homer with Ovid: “And Ovid brings in Jupiter coming down sometimes alone and sometimes with Mercurie, and knocking at mens doores, to see what entertainment they gave unto strangers.”20 Dalechamp’s gloss specifies the episodes he has in mind: the punishment of Lycaon in Book 1 of the Metamorphoses and the blessing of Philemon and Baucis in Book 8. Dalechamp does not comment any further, but the conventional pairing of Lycaon with Philemon and Baucis points to the dynamic interplay among Virgilian, Ovidian, and later Christian understandings of hospitality. Evander is the devout king whose son is nonetheless a casualty of Aeneas’s triumph; Lycaon is Evander’s impious Arcadian forebear. When Jove arrives at Lycaon’s inhospita tecta, Lycaon intuits that the guest might be a god, but he plans to test this possibility by attempting to kill him.21 Lycaon’s perversity plays a role in the affirmation of Jove’s preeminence, which had been challenged by the recent revolt of the Giants. Jove expresses his wish to punish all of humanity following Lycaon’s example and then he satisfies the gods who clamour for justice by recounting how he had already punished Lycaon. Lycaon’s inhospitable cookery becomes linked to a broader question of divine justice and the communicability of guilt. Lycaon tests his guest not by trying to kill him in his sleep, but rather by offering him an abominable meal. When Lycaon presents the flesh of a human hostage – some of it cooked in boiling water (ferventibus aquis), some of it over fire (igni) – Jove immediately lashes out (1.228-9). Lycaon’s double mode of cookery is matched and amplified by Jove’s punishment. Jove describes how he brought an avenging flame (vindice flamma) upon Lycaon’s household (1.230). He subsequently decides that Lycaon’s precedent is enough to punish all of humanity and, with the eager approval of the other gods, does so with a flood. Using both fire and water, Jove arrogates the methods of Lycaon’s cookery for a display of his divine power. As a result, even the seemingly trivial details of Philemon’s cooking alongside his wife Baucis assume importance. When Jove and Mercury arrive, Philemon and Baucis share the duties of hospitality. The husband pulls out a seat while the wife drapes a covering over it; the wife prepares the vegetables that the husband had gathered. This

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synchronized cooperation is temporarily interrupted by animal cookery. Philemon assumes his husbandly role by preparing meat, while Baucis prepares the vegetables and grains, even though he can only offer sordida terga, a wretched chine (8.648). Although Philemon and Baucis jointly light a fire, the slices of chine are not roasted directly on the flames but rather cooked in boiling water. The phrase “ferventibus undis” (8.630) recalls both the ferventibus aquis of Lycaon’s cookery and the floodwaters with which Jove punished all humanity. Yet these echoes underscore the fact that Philemon’s boiled chine satisfies the gods. Lycaon’s abominable cooking brings not just a fire upon his own household but also a flood upon the human race. By contrast, the Phrygians are justly punished for their lack of hospitality while Philemon and Baucis do not need to burn a sacrificial offering. When the couple begin to realize together the divine identities of their guests, they do attempt to sacrifice a goose. They coordinate efforts once again, but only in a shared act of futility. Jove and Mercury allow for a farcical interlude in which the goose eludes the couple for a time and then find refuge in the gods (8.687-8). Jove and Mercury then expressly deny the necessity of sacrifice. Within Philemon and Baucis’s household, the gods do not demand sacrificial death but rather harbour life. The reason Philemon and Baucis’s hospitality is so modest may also explain why it is deemed satisfactory. The two share domestic duties because they constitute the entire household: “tota domus duo sunt” (8.636). If this phrase describes a lack of servants, it also suggests the lack of children. Rather than explaining whether Philemon and Baucis have always been childless, the narrative is simply silent on the matter. Philemon and Baucis do not need burnt sacrifice to transmit their piety to their progeny; their humble hospitality can serve as the corrective to Lycaon’s wickedness, which had been imputed to all humanity. Yet Philemon and Baucis cannot simply avoid mortality. Whereas the goose finds final refuge in the gods, Philemon and Baucis become priests for the remainder of their lives (“donec vita data est”) before dying together (8.712). This death becomes a perfected form of ­unanimity; the trees that are said to have sprung up from their bodies serve as a form of posthumous life. This natural afterlife may be viewed – according to the blessing that Ovid’s storyteller Lelex utters – as its own form of apotheosis. “Cura deum di sint,” Lelex concludes, “qui coluere, colantur” (8.724). The opening clause (literally, “May the cares of the gods be gods”) captures the reciprocation arising out

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of hospitality: Philemon and Baucis should be gods because they have cared for the gods and are dear to them. This account of perfected hospitality takes part in Ovid’s interrogation of the politics of epic.22 In Book 1, Ovid aligns Lycaon’s violation with the assassination of Julius Caesar, and Jove’s authority with Augustus Caesar’s. Yet this comparison contains an ambiguity whereby Julius Caesar may be aligned with Lycaon. Ovid lures the reader into comparing the gods who desire retribution upon Lycaon with the wicked band who seek to extinguish the name of Rome with the blood of Caesar (see 1.199-201). Ovid immediately corrects this suggestion through another parallel: just as Lycaon’s violation occasions a flood that punishes all of humanity, so does Caesar’s death cause the humanum gens and the entire world to shudder in terror (1.203). This parallel reinforces the sense that Caesar’s blood (which extinguishes the Roman name) is like the flood that Jove unleashes to drown humanity. Even if Augustus Caesar’s power can thus be likened to Jove’s authority, Julius Caesar is unlike Jove: Julius Caesar suffers a violation just as Jove is aggrieved by Lycaon, but Caesar cannot vindicate himself. Rather, Caesar’s violation serves as both the justification for Augustus Caesar’s authority as well as something like an expression of that power. Through this unstable comparison, Lycaon’s violation of hospitality brings about a rupture in the chain of cause and effect (whereby Julius Caesar’s blood is conflated with the punishment that should be a response to his bloodshed) and in hereditary succession (so that Augustus Caesar can be celebrated even while the unnaturalness of this succession is foregrounded). These paradoxes are to be overcome, at least putatively, when Jove oversees the apotheosis of Julius Caesar at the end of the Metamorphoses. Julius Caesar can himself be like a god even while Augustus Caesar’s Jove-like authority is reaffirmed. Yet close to the very center of the entire poetic sequence, Philemon and Baucis embody the virtue of hospitality, the violation of which was the original human failing and the grounds for unleashing Jove’s power. Ovid has hospitality perfected not under the auspices (and for the blessing) of an imperial household but rather within an entirely domestic one. Without a dynastic future to safeguard, Philemon and Baucis can receive a form of immortality merely for being at peace with their shared mortality. Within this story, intergenerational descent is something to be sorted out among the gods rather than humans.23 As Dalechamp reminds us, this is the story of hospitality in which Jove arrives with his son

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Mercury. The arrival of Mercury is not as indifferent as Dalechamp’s phrase “sometimes alone and sometimes with Mercurie” suggests. It is telling that at this moment, Ovid explicitly refers to Mercury arriving with his parent as a descendant of Atlas (through his mother Maia): “cum parente / venit Atlantiades positis caducifer alis” (8.627). Mercury descends as a filial deity who mediates both between heaven and earth, and between his father’s and mother’s side. In the opening books of the Metamorphoses, Mercury had specifically been identified as a descendent of Atlas within stories – that of Syrinx and of Battus – that locate gods and humans in relations of transgressive erotic desire and antagonistic envy (see 1.682, 2.685-704). Later, in Book 4, Mercury’s son Hermaphroditus is also identified as a descendant of Atlas (see 4. 368). For Hermaphroditus, bodily union with Salmacis is an undesired and unwelcome fate; Mercury and Venus respond to the plight of their son by cursing the pool of Salmacis for any man who might later touch it. It is within this context that Philemon and Baucis model a happy conjugal partnership that culminates in the blessing of mythic union at the end of their life together. The unanimity between Philemon and Baucis – exhibited in their hospitality and then perfected afterwards – affirms the momentary harmonization of Mercury’s patrilineal and matrilineal identifications.24 Mercury has found a proper welcome in a household where husband and wife are satisfied to live and die together, without the need to work out their own hereditary descent. Near the center of the Metamorphoses, Philemon and Baucis’s joint hospitality holds together a complex pattern of overlapping correctives.

3 We can speculate about whether Dalechamp’s choice to cite Ovid’s depictions of hospitality without mentioning Virgil’s was chiefly a matter of expedience in illustrating a theological point or an implicit disclosure of cultural values. We can be more certain that Milton was conscious of the role that Philemon and Baucis’s hospitality plays within Ovid’s reconsideration of the politics of epic. Yet the New Testament reveals how Ovid’s story of sacrifice being deemed unnecessary could prove even more directly relevant to the history of Christianity. The Acts of the Apostles record how Paul and Barnabas, facing persecution in Iconium, “fled unto Lystra and Derbe, cities of Lycaonia,” in Asia Minor (Acts 14:6). After healing a man in Lystra,

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Paul and Barnabas are accosted by locals who cry out in their Lycaonian language, “The gods are come down to us in the likeness of men.” Paul and Barnabas are identified as Jupiter and Mercury; the priest of Jupiter “brought oxen and garlands unto the streets, and would have done sacrifice with the people” (Acts 14:11-13). The stories of Lycaon and of Philemon and Baucis serve as a backdrop to this episode. As Amy L. Wordelman argues, because writers such as Dionysus of Halicarnassus had established an association of Lycaonia in Asia Minor with the Arcadian Lycaon, the “double meaning of ‘Lycaonian’ was … frequently assumed in late antiquity.”25 In the Lukan narrative, the Eastern Lycaonians (who live adjacent to Phrygia, where Ovid’s Philemon and Baucis reside) have taken to heart the principle of theoxenia. Yet in the New Testament narrative as in the Philemon and Baucis story, sacrifice is deemed unnecessary. In this new instance, Christ has rendered animal sacrifice obsolete, and the avoidance of sacrifice allows Paul and Barnabas to deny spurious claims of their own divinity. These divergent meanings of the absence of sacrifice – as looking ahead to the necessity of Christ’s death, but also to the obsolescence of sacrifice after Christ – govern the relevance of the Philemon and Baucis story for Milton’s presentation of Edenic hospitality. When Raphael arrives in Book 5 of Paradise Lost, Adam commissions Eve to prepare a meal: “what thy stores contain, bring forth and pour / Abundance, fit to honour and receive / Our heavenly stranger” (5.31416). Adam partly resembles Abraham insofar as both command their wives to prepare food that they will then present as hosts. Yet Adam’s complete lack of participation in cookery distinguishes him from not only from Abraham but also from Philemon. Adam distances himself entirely from domestic labour by labeling the stores of food exclusively as Eve’s. Eve subsequently corrects Adam’s misunderstanding of the nature of food preparation: there is only a “small store” of food because most Edenic fruit should be consumed quickly. As a result, Eve must pick new fruit to offer to the angelic guest. She performs this task with “hospitable thoughts intent” (5.332).26 The implications of this division of labour are mixed. On the one hand, Eve manifests her status not only as a wife but also as a hostess in her own right. Eve’s role in hospitality parallels the example of Sarah but also surpasses it insofar as she works alone. On the other hand, Eve’s labour affirms Adam’s sense that a husband can command rather than share in domestic labour.

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There are seemingly straightforward reasons why Milton’s Adam might not feel any need to take part in food preparation. Hospitable men are called upon to cook meat, but the absence of meat is a sign of Edenic innocence. As a would-be patriarch, unfallen Adam has no need to shield his future progeny from the dangers of a hospitable encounter. Yet when Raphael first addresses Eve, he obliquely links human reproduction to the eventual need for sacrifice in a fallen world: Hail mother of mankind, whose fruitful womb Shall fill the world more numerous with thy sons Than with these various fruits the trees of God Have heaped this table. (5.388-91) Martindale notes the “startling, even incongruous” nature of Raphael’s greeting and describes it as evidence of a “baroque sensibility” that Ovid and Milton share.27 My reading focuses on the soteriological significance that Raphael’s salutation confers up on the hospitality scene and, more specifically, on the meal that is soon to be served. The angel ostensibly compares human offspring to fruit to describe abundance, but the status of this fruit as food ominously hints at a postlapsarian world in which people are food for a personified Death. At the same stroke, Raphael ignores the fact that Eve has actively heaped the table before him. In aligning Eve’s fertility with merely natural abundance, Raphael ignores her deliberate work of hospitality. Yet Eve has no reason to respond in the way that Sarah responds incredulously to the prophecy of her childbearing. Later on, the encounter with Raphael will produce a gendered disparity in knowledge when Eve exits the conversation (which turns to the topic of strained gender relations). At this moment, however, both Adam and Eve are equally unaware of the full meaning of this salutation. Yet Milton explicitly describes Raphael as hailing Eve in the way that Gabriel would later hail “blest Mary, second Eve” (5.387). Adam and Eve cannot realize that their commission to reproduce to fill the earth will, after the Fall, be superseded by the prophecy of the birth of the Son of God. If Raphael’s salutation generates an irony for the Christian reader, that irony points to the redemptive plan that God has foreseen. This plan undercuts the prestige of Adamic paternity. The progeny that will matter most for redemptive history is specifically and

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repeatedly designated as the woman’s seed. Adam will thus be unlike Abraham: “This patriarch blest,” Michael explains in the final book of the epic, “Whom faithful Abraham due time shall call, / A son, and of his son a grandchild leaves” (12.151-3). Michael takes part in the typological interpretation whereby Abraham is elevated as a patriarchal exemplar of faith. Yet Michael has already taught Adam that he has lost his patriarchal prestige: this had been Perhaps thy capital seat, from whence had spread All generations, and had hither come From all the ends of the earth, to celebrate And reverence thee their great progenitor. But this pre-eminence thou hast lost. (11.342-7) In Milton’s handling, Abraham’s elevation as Israel’s patriarch is folded within a typological understanding – pointing to the second Adam, who is the woman’s seed and not destined to be a father himself – that works against Adamic patriarchy and affirms instead God as the Father. In retrospect, we can discern what was fully at stake in Edenic food preparation. Raphael hails Eve, not Adam, as the parent who will “fill the world … with [her] sons” (5.389). The narrator anticipates this salutation by describing how Eve, in her task of preparing a meal, gathers “[w]hatever earth all-bearing mother yields” (5.338). Eve’s interaction with the maternal abundance of Eden – which is linked to her future motherhood – already resists a patriarchal understanding of Eden as Adam’s capital seat. Unlike Adam, Eve is aware that Edenic abundance should only yield a “small store.” As a result, Eve’s role is not to receive reverence passively but rather to perform humble but divinely sanctioned labour. The aftermath of the Fall affirms Eve’s disposition as the proper one – not just for herself but also for Adam – in God’s plan. Michael’s devaluation of Adamic fatherhood underscores the fact that Paradise Lost does not celebrate the progenitor of a human empire and the establishment of its capital. The celebration of God’s universal kingdom – and of the Son as his sole heir – must overshadow any narrative of human fatherhood. We might recall that in Book 8 of the Aeneid, the hospitable Evander unwittingly leads his guest Aeneas to the site of the future Roman Capitol: “hinc ad Tarpeiam sedem et

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Capitolia ducit” (8.347). Milton puns on the etymological link between capitals and the Roman Capitol when he has Adam rejoicing over the promised birth of God’s Son: “so God with man unites. / Needs must the serpent now his capital bruise / Expect with mortal pain” (12.382-3). This bruise will be on the serpent’s caput. Whereas Eden might have been Adam’s capital seat, the capital bruise will be achieved by the “seed of woman” born of his “virgin Mother” (12.3679). Adam’s own apostrophe to Mary completes Raphael’s salutation of the first Eve; Adam does not merely accept but rather rejoices in the attenuation of human paternity. Adam’s unfolding knowledge of reproduction, sacrifice, and redemption forms a chiastic pattern with the Christian reader’s retrospective understanding of the first man. Adam’s initial imperative to reproduce to propagate dominion all over the earth is replaced by the need to rejoin his wife in anticipation of the woman’s seed. Adam learns that in a fallen world, hereditary descent is more effective at transferring sinfulness and death than life. Without the salvation to be brought by the woman’s seed, Adam fears that he would merely be cursed by his progeny. For the Christian reader, Christ has already completed the work of atonement; for Adam, Christ’s sacrifice is a remote matter of faith rather than of direct participation. The way Milton distances Adamic manhood from biblical and epic celebrations of patriarchs clarifies the underlying importance of Ovid’s Philemon. The story of Philemon and Baucis, as we have seen, can be deemed imperfect by Christian readers insofar as it sidesteps the necessity of sacrifice in securing a reproductive future. Yet the exceptional case that Ovid narrates can still be useful to Christians who want to teach that sacrifice is no longer desirable. The Ovidian precedent is significant not only as an alternative to the story of Abraham and Sarah, but also as a link between a typological understanding of that Hebraic narrative and a reconsideration of the values of classical epic. For Ovid, domestic harmony suffices to mediate between humanity and divinity precisely when a dynastic future is not a human concern. Practically, all of this means that Adam must learn to be more like Philemon as he discovers he is less like Abraham or Aeneas. Milton certainly does share the Christian understanding of the Philemon and Baucis episode as incomplete, with its partial resemblance to the Abrahamic narrative pointing to the need for the Son’s sacrifice. Yet in the final books of Paradise Lost, Milton works to sunder the link between sacrifice and the preservation of patrilineal descent. Adam’s

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vision of history features Abel’s animal sacrifice. Whereas Cain’s grain offering is rejected, Abel’s offering is consumed by a “propitious fire from heaven” (11.441). Yet this vision affirms that in the fallen world, sacrifice disrupts rather than safeguards human descent: the survival of Adam’s firstborn son is ensured by God, but only after Cain is branded a murderer of his pious brother. Milton’s aversion to sacrifice recurs in the story of the Flood. As we have seen, Philemon and Baucis’s hospitality serves as a corrective to Lycaon’s wickedness. The flood that results from Lycaon’s act is one of the best known occasions for euhemeristic interpretation. In contrast to Jove, however, Yahweh saves the “one just man” Noah (as Milton describes him) while punishing all others who merit punishment (11.818). In Genesis, Noah exits the ark and offers a burnt offering of “every clean beast”; after smelling the “sweet savour,” Yahweh decrees that he will not punish the world in the same way again (Gen. 8:20-1). Sacrifice, in other words, transmits the benefits of Noah’s faithfulness to the future. Yet Milton’s account entirely omits Noah’s sacrifice and emphasizes instead God’s prerogative in offering grace to humanity (see 11.889-93). This Miltonic episode reinforces the lesson about the loss of Adamic preeminence as a patriarch. Noah becomes the second universal progenitor, not merely by being first but rather by being singularly good. If burnt sacrifice has preserved only a distorted form of Adam’s progeny, Adam is superseded as the sole father of humanity without any mention of burnt offering. Milton adds to the end of Genesis 8 the lesson that fire will eventually “purge all things new / Both heaven and earth” (11.900-1). Fire will no longer be a human instrument of sacrifice but rather God’s instrument of avenging purification. Milton’s diminution of animal sacrifice ultimately points to his ambivalence about Christ’s sacrifice. Readers have long been aware of Milton’s inability to narrate the crucifixion, as illustrated by his abortive Passion poem and the avoidance of the topic in Paradise Regained. Milton’s view of Adamic manhood is conditioned by the conflicted impulses to affirm the necessity of Christ’s sacrifice while also shifting emphasis away from it. After the Fall, Adam must learn to exhibit the kind of mutuality with his wife that renders Philemon’s hospitality acceptable to the gods. Paradise Lost ends with Adam and Eve exhibiting a form of complete mutuality that was missing in their initial union. We have no grounds to believe that this means that Adam will do his share of domestic labour. Milton does emphasize

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Adam and Eve’s shared labour when it comes to the cultivation of Eden. When it comes to domestic work, however, Milton may continue to exhibit a relative indifference to gender parity. Yet this blind spot exists within an attempt to imagine a spiritual and intellectual mutuality within marriage. Adam and Eve may never coordinate duties in the way that Philemon and Baucis do – Milton largely repeats the curses on Adam and Eve found in Genesis 3, which reinforce gendered differences in a fallen world. Yet Paradise Lost mounts a forwardlooking closure by suggesting that Adam and Eve will share a life of meaningful co-operation nonetheless. *** This essay has argued that the Ovidian story of Philemon and Baucis furnishes Milton a poetic and mythic resource for redefining Adamic masculinity. The partial avoidance of sacrifice within the scene of hospitality facilitates Milton’s promotion of Adam’s status as husband over his status as would-be patriarch. Yet in Milton’s theological imagination, this deflection cannot obtain in a straightforward or permanent fashion. Paradise Lost openly announces God’s demand for sacrificial atonement, which the Son alone will be able to satisfy (see 3.203-12). In Paradise Regained, Milton focuses on the incarnate Son’s redemptive mission but continues to forestall the crucifixion. Near the very end of the latter epic, Milton explicitly likens Jesus’s victory over Satan to Oedipus’s early triumph over the “that Theban monster,” the Sphinx, “that proposed / Her riddle.”28 Oedipus had offered the correct answer – “man” – to the Sphinx’s riddle; Milton’s comparison suggests that Jesus triumphs by redefining and recuperating manhood after the Fall. Yet the triumphant Jesus returns to his mother’s house to await the public culmination of his redemptive mission. This non-resolution amplifies the sense that Milton does not fully resolve the relationship between the first and second Adam, between the two paradigmatic forms of divinely ordained human masculinity. Whereas the first Adam – especially in Milton’s rewriting of Genesis – struggles to clarify his relationships to God and to his wife Eve, the second Adam is the son to the second Eve and seeks to clarify his descent from his divine Father. The story of Philemon and Baucis helps us to discern the way that Milton works to promote a specifically Adamic form of masculinity redefined around conjugal love. Within God’s redemptive plan (as foretold by the angel Michael in the last books of Paradise Lost), the

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ultimate goal of restored conjugal union is to give rise to the Son of God as the woman’s seed. Yet Milton effects a split between this divine plan and human experience; for the latter, love is promoted above the mandate to reproduce. The treatment of hospitality in Paradise Lost helps to establish the grounds for this division. In the Ovidian story of hospitality, I have argued, patrilineal and matrilineal descent momentarily becomes a matter for the gods rather than humans to sort out. In the hospitality scene in Paradise Lost, Adam and Eve learn a revealing lesson about the primordial contestation over God’s dynastic line. The earliest event in Raphael’s narration of cosmic history is God’s original presentation of his Son; all of creation is an epiphenomenon of the rebellion that ensues. Raphael is Milton’s Mercury figure, whose epic descent to earth should mediate between divinity and humanity.29 Yet Milton explicitly signals the practical futility of Raphael’s mission. As the Argument to Book 5 explains, God commissions Raphael not to prevent the Fall but rather “to render man inexcusable.”30 Not only will Raphael’s lesson fail to prevent the Fall, hospitality does not suffice to clarify the Son’s contested relationship with his Father. Whereas Philemon and Baucis’s conjugal harmony accommodates the expression of Mercury’s twinned descent from Jove and from Atlas – via Maia – as a happy fact, Milton’s Raphael cannot help perfect human marriage. Milton’s extended scene of hospitality ends abruptly with Raphael’s inability to assuage Adam’s concerns about his marriage. At the very outset of Raphael’s descent, Milton had identified him as “the sociable spirit, that deigned / To travel with Tobias, and secured / His marriage with the seven-times-weddedmaid” (5.221-3). Yet if Raphael successfully brokers a marriage in the apocryphal narrative, the assistance he brings to Eden will not work. Milton has already told us that Satan arrives at Eden “better pleased / Than Asmodeus with the fishy fume” (4.167-8). Satan, not Raphael, is the real stranger; in dealing with him, obedience to God does not require hospitality but rather exclusion. Adam and Eve’s failure to reject Satan anticipates the need for Jesus’s triumph in Paradise Regained. In the latter epic, hospitality and the offering of a meal is merely a satanic ruse to be rejected repeatedly. Instead of a story of welcoming strangers who might be angels, Milton’s second epic concludes with Jesus accepting a meal only from angels – food that he deems appropriately pure – and then returning to the confines of his mother’s house.

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This is not to say that Milton overturns the Christian exhortation to be hospitable in the name of defensive purity. Rather, Milton reveals hospitality to be a virtue that cannot be perfected by God and his Son, but only by loving human subjects. The imperfect nature of Edenic hospitality looks ahead to an open-ended hope for Adam and Eve’s full unanimity in a fallen world. Milton does not depict hospitality as the completed expression of conjugal love because he pursues aims that both parallel and diverge from the conclusion of the Philemon and Baucis story. Adam and Eve, too, must confront the prospect of mortality. Yet Milton valorizes their shared life over shared death. By making sacrifice and death matters for God and his Son to resolve so that they can clarify their long-contested relationship once and for all, Milton turns living into the properly human concern. Adam and Eve are free to exhibit their newfound cooperation. The original man, who initially did not deign to join his wife in the work of hospitality, exits the poem as a husband rather than as an expectant patriarch.

Not e s   1 I thank Alice Dailey, Nora Johnson, Matt Kozusko, Nichole Miller, Lauren Shohet, Jamie Taylor, and Emily Weissbourd for their valuable suggestions on an earlier draft of this essay.   2 John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler (Harlow: Longman, 1998), 249, 303; 4.495, 5.350. All quotations of Paradise Lost are taken from this volume and will be cited parenthetically by book and line number.   3 As David Quint argues, in Inside Paradise Lost: Reading the Designs of Milton’s Epic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 1, “Adam’s choosing love for Eve … over obedience to God” is the “central human heroic act” of Paradise Lost. Quint, 218–23, details the relevant contrasts between Aeneas and Milton’s Adam.   4 See, for example, Lynn Enterline, The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Goran V. Stanivukovic, ed., Ovid and the Renaissance Body (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001); and Jenny C. Mann, “Marlowe’s ‘Slack Muse’: All Ovids Elegies and an English Poetics of Softness,” Modern Philology 113.1 (2015): 49–65.   5 Charles Martindale, John Milton and the Transformation of Ancient Epic (Totowa, N J: Barnes and Noble, 1986), 184. The Philemon and Baucis

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story has not figured prominently in other extended accounts of Ovid’s influence on Milton. Both Richard J. DuRocher, in Milton and Ovid (Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press, 1985), 197–8, and Maggie Kilgour, in Milton and the Metamorphosis of Ovid (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 70, cite Philemon and Baucis only in passing. For an insightful study of Milton and Ovid that does not refer to Philemon and Baucis, see Mandy Green, Milton’s Ovidian Eve (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009).  6 Martindale, John Milton, 185.   7 Anne Dufourmantelle and Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 21.   8 Swen Voekel, “Propitious Guests: Paradise Lost and Epic Hospitality,” Milton Studies 54 (2013): 209, 209–27.   9 The relationship between cooking and sacrifice is a broad and complex topic that I will be engaging with only as it relates to the particular instances of hospitality in question. On cooking and sacrifice in ancient Greece, see Marcel Detienne, Jean-Pierre Vernant, et al., The Cuisine of Sacrifice among the Greeks, trans. Paula Wissig (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989). For a recent exploration of the topic as it relates to the Hebrew Bible, see Nathan MacDonald, Not Bread Alone: The Uses of Food in the Old Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), esp. 100–33. 10 John Edwards, A Discourse Concerning the Authority, Stile, and Perfection of the Books of the Old and New Testament (London: Richard Wilkin, 1693), 131. 11 All biblical quotations are from the 1611 Authorized Version. 12 Between the story of Abraham and Sarah’s hospitality and the aqedah, the story of Lot serves as a foil to the central narrative of Israel’s patriarchal line. Lot does not offer of a meal to angelic visitors but instead offers his daughters to appease the would-be rapists in Sodom. After Lot’s wife is lost not to a lack of belief but rather to recalcitrance, Lot’s line is established incestuously with his daughters. For a recuperative reading of Lot’s wife as exhibiting a meaningful attachment – an affective and ethical attachment to be understood anew through queer phenomenology – see Lowell Gallagher, Sodomscapes: Hospitality in the Flesh (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017). 13 Tracy McNulty, The Hostess: Hospitality, Femininity, and the Expropriation of Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 11. 14 Caleb Dalechamp, Christian Hospitalitie (Cambridge: Th. Buck, 1632), 78. Although I do not know of any interaction between Dalechamp and Milton, Christian Hospitalitie was published at Cambridge in the same year that Milton took his M A; the printer, Thomas Buck, later printed

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– along with Roger Daniel – Justa Edouardo King naufrago, in which Milton’s Lycidas originally appeared. 15 Ibid., 82. 16 On the way Eumaus’s hospitality and sacrificial butchery are thoroughly conventional while also diverging from the norm, see Steve Reece, The Stranger’s Welcome: Oral Theory and the Aesthetics of the Homeric Hospitality Scene (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 145–64. 17 Eumaus’s hospitality helps to restore Odysseus’s household and to hierarchize the father-son bond over that of husband and wife. In the opening book of the Odyssey, Telemachus links the presence of his mother’s suitors and the impossibility of genuine hospitality to the question of his own legitimate birth; see 1.215-16. By learning from Eumaus to welcome his unrecognized father back home, Telemachus restores his family in a way Penelope could not. Penelope has allowed her suitors to imperil genuine hospitality. On the way the women of the Odyssey cannot exhibit genuine hospitality but are instead dangerous enchantresses, see Judith Still, Derrida and Hospitality: Theory and Practice (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 52–66. 18 Virgil, Aeneid, Virgil: Aeneid 7-12, Appendix Vergiliana, trans. H.R. Fairclough, rev. G.P. Goold (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 2001), 72; 8.183. The phrase lustralibus extis has posed interpretive problems because sacrificial exta are not for human consumption; the link between hospitable meat cookery and sacrifice threatens to become too ­literal in this case. For the suggestion that lustralibus is a roundabout way – borrowing from Homer – to describe a five-year-old ox, see P.T. Eden, A Commentary on Virgil: Aeneid VIII (Leiden: Brill, 1975), 73. 19 The gens Fabia deriving their ancestry from Evander is a topic beyond the scope of my argument. For a discussion of the Fabii complicating Roman unity in Ovidian poetry, see Byron Harries, “Ovid and the Fabii: Fasti 2.193-474,” Classical Quarterly 41.1 (1991): 150–68. 20 Dalechamp, Christian Hospitalitie, 82. 21 Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller, rev. G.P. Goold, 2 vols. (Cambridge, M A: Harvard University Press, 1976-77), 1:17; 1:221. All quotations of the Metamorphoses are from this edition and will be cited parenthetically by book and line number. 22 The exact position of Ovid’s Metamorphoses with regard to Augustan ­politics, to the epic genre, and – more specifically – to Virgil constitutes one of the most longstanding points of debate in Western literary criticism. For a useful overview of the topic as it relates to Milton’s view of Ovid, see Kilgour, Milton and the Metamorphosis, 19–27. Kilgour favours a

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view of Virgil and Ovid as “continuous, not antithetical” (27). This view is informed by scholarly developments across the last few decades, represented by such works as Alessandro Barchiesi, The Poet and the Price: Ovid and the Augustan Discourse (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Stephen Hinds, Allusion and Intertext: Dynamics of Appropriation in Roman Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Richard F. Thomas, Virgil and the Augustan Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 23 As Philip Hardie reminds us, in The Epic Successors of Virgil: A Study in the Dynamics of a Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 94, Ovid “largely avoids putting the theme of generational continuity at the centre of his poem.” Ovid is relatively anomalous among Roman poets, for whom the politics of family and succession are f­undamental concerns. 24 As Thomas M. Greene observes, in The Descent from Heaven: A Study in Epic Continuity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 83, Virgil had made emphatic the ancestral link between Mercury and Atlas in order to advance his central heroic narrative: “Atlas embodies the qualities which Aeneas has temporarily forgotten.” In Book VIII of the Metamorphoses, Ovid reinforces the connection between Atlas and Mercury under the aegis of a much humbler form of heroic domesticity. 25 Amy L. Wordelman, “Cultural Divides and Dual Realities: A Greco-Roman Context for Acts 14,” in Contextualizing Acts: Lukan Narrative and Greco-Roman Discourse, ed. Todd C. Penner and Caroline Vander Stichele (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003), 224, 205–32. See also Vernon K. Robbins, The Tapestry of Early Christian Discourse: Rhetoric, Society, and Ideology (London: Routledge, 1996), 205. 26 For the intellectual and civic value that Milton confers upon Eve’s labour, see Amy L. Tigner, “Eating with Eve,” Milton Quarterly 44 (2010): 239–53; and Laura Lunger Knoppers, Politicizing Domesticity from Henrietta Maria to Milton’s Eve (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 140–64. 27 Martindale, John Milton, 188. 28 John Milton, Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, 2nd rev. ed. (Harlow: Longman, 2007), 509; 4.572-3. 29 On the way Milton’s Raphael assumes the role of the messenger who descends from heaven – a role specially associated with Hermes or Mercury in classical epic – see Greene, 363–87. 30 Milton, Paradise Lost, 281.

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12 Ovid’s Proteus and the Figure of the Male Jew in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta Lisa S. Starks

In his Prologue to the performance of Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta at the Cocke-Pit, Thomas Heywood describes the late Edward Alleyn, who had formerly portrayed Barabas, as a “Proteus for shapes, and Roscius for a tongue, / So could he speake, so vary” (10-11).1 It is especially appropriate that Heywood invokes Ovid’s Proteus in the prologue for this particular play, and that he cites Pygmalion – the Ovidian icon of the artist – along with the legendary painter, Apelles, in its epilogue: In Graving, with Pigmalion to contend; Or painting, with Apelles; doubtless the end Must be disgrace: our Actor did not so, He only aym’d to goe, but not out-goe. (1-4)2 The two verses frame The Jew of Malta as an explicitly Ovidian, meta-theatrical production that self-consciously showcases theatrical metamorphosis, the act of creating illusions, and Proteus as a figure of Ovidian genderfluid masculinity.3 In The Jew of Malta, Marlowe associates this Ovidian theatricality and gender fluidity to the problematic masculinity surrounding images of the male Jew in early modern culture. Through Barabas, who functions as an interior actor and playwright,4 Marlowe fuses the image of Ovid’s Proteus with that of the Stage-Jew – a figure transformed

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from anti-Semitic images and discourses on Jewish masculinity, ­particularly tropes of the shape-shifting Jew – to engage with and ­comment on intersections of gender, sexuality, and anti-Semitism prevalent in contemporaneous anti-theatrical discourses. In the process of censuring his own Christian culture and exposing the absurdity of anti-Semitic stereotypes, Marlowe imparts the representation of outcast, queer Jewish masculinity with Ovidian gender fluidity and the power and energy, as well as the danger and vulnerability, of the theatre itself. As the Stage-Jew, Marlowe’s Barabas embodies this fluidity and the double-edged, metamorphic potentialities of theatre. In his gleeful plotting and role-playgoing, Barabas – a surrogate for Marlowe, who identified himself as an Ovidian writer – is endowed with the vigour and transgressive potential of the counter-tradition that Ovid represented in the Renaissance. Through Barabas, Marlowe exceeds, dismantles, and transforms the Jew-Devil figure (discussed fully below), thereby satirizing that stereotype, along with the anti-theatricalists’ condemnation of the stage and the threat to normative gender, sexuality, and religious purity that they claimed it posed. Furthermore, Marlowe employs Proteus to champion the figure of the Jew in a scathing critique of heroic masculinity, Petrarchan love, and normative sexuality. Although the outcast Barabas’s love of theatricality leads to his inevitable destruction, it is his protean energy – and the Ovidian theatricality that it champions – that inspired the greatest impact on the early modern stage and the longest afterlife in theatrical and cultural memory.

O v id , A n t i- T h e atri cali ty, a n d   O u t c as t   M as culi ni ty Marlowe found the source of this protean vigour in Ovid, whose Elegies he translated and myths he remediated in his poems and plays. Marlowe modelled his own career after Ovid, according to Patrick Cheney, becoming the ultimate Ovidian poet-playwright of his time.5 Besides providing themes, subjects, and poetic methods that influenced the dramaturgy of the age, Ovid – his poetry and his persona – became the means though which practices of playing and the experience of playgoing on the English stage were self-consciously conceived, explored, articulated, and debated.6 Ovid (as an icon) and his poetry were cited by both sides of the political divide on theatricality – the

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enemies and the friends of the stage. In fact, a wide range of writers – Stephen Gosson, William Prynne, Thomas Heywood, and so on – indirectly and directly refer to, cite, or quote Ovid when either attacking or defending the stage in their treatises. As a poet who became the embodiment of sweet, seductive verse, Ovid inspired a deep-seated ambivalence in early modern culture, one that ran parallel to contradictory discourses about the theatre, as well as the non-normative gender identities and sexual desires that moralists feared it unleashed. Many of these conflicts, which Marlowe fully exploits in his poems and plays, surface in writings concerning the protean actor, who takes on the shape and emotions of another, thereby incarnating what the anti-theatricalists considered to be Ovid’s damnable philosophy of continuous, anti-masculine changeability.7 In these discourses, protean changeability is inextricably linked to the misogynistic stereotype of women as deceptive and dissembling, gendering both the theatre and the art of acting as feminine and therefore sinful. Notably, when condemning male effeminacy, which he describes as an effect of playgoing, Gosson cites Ovid’s description of Roman audiences from Ars amatoria: “In Rome, when Plaies or Pageants are showne: Ovid chargeth his Pilgrims to creep close to the Saintes whom they serve and shew their double diligence to lifte the gentlewomens roabes from the grounde for rolling in the duste.”8 In this passage, Gosson appropriates Ovid to rail against the supposed threat that the theatrical experience posed to normative masculinity, using the Roman poet to illustrate what he viewed as its dangerous potential to turn men into slaves of love who shamefully exhibit feminine submission and wallow in sinful behaviour. And condemning women’s use of cosmetics, Phillip Stubbes writes, “Proteus, that Monster, could never chaunge him self into so many fourmes & shapes as these women doo: belike they have made an obligation with hel, and are at agreement with the devil.”9 For these writers, the theatre is a feminine snare by which men’s souls can be caught and their manhood emasculated. The fear of men transforming into women was exacerbated by the anxiety concerning the blurred gender boundaries of cross-dressing on the stage, as well as the seductive potentiality of the theatrical experience in general. Early modern moralists, such as the Puritan William Prynne, employed this same misogynistic rhetoric when attacking sodomites and Jews, characterizing them in comparable terms as licentious, ambiguously gendered tools of the devil – and associating them both

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with “feminine” metamorphosis and cross-dressing on the stage. This deeply-rooted connection between the figure of the sodomite and the male Jew was inherited from earlier centuries; for, as John Boswell explains, “Jews and gay people were often tacitly linked in later medieval law and literature as non-conformists threatening social order.”10 The anti-theatricalists draw from this tradition in their polemics, depicting the sodomite and male Jew as figures who dangerously transgressed norms of masculinity, thereby contaminating themselves by association with the sinful nature of woman and the horror of mutability itself. As Bruce R. Smith puts it, for the enemies of the stage, “sodomy is the ultimate in a Babylonian school of abuses,” for “[t]o play the sodomite is, in these writers’ eyes, to play the female.”11 Male Jews were condemned for theatricality and cross-dressing in similar ways, as in Prynne’s A Short Demurer to the Jewes.12 In their tracts, moralists point to the festival of Purim, in which players perform the Biblical story of Esther in costume to celebrate the victory of the Jewish people over oppression. In A View of All Religions in the World (1672), moralist Alexander Ross describes the holiday as one of authorized transvestism, in which “men wear women’s apparel and the women men’s, against the law of God which they think at this time of mirth they may lawfully violate.”13 In this way, the outlaw masculinity of the sodomite was linked to the figure of the outcast, queer male Jew, further emphasizing the view of the latter’s gender and sexuality as threatening to patriarchal Christian order. Thus, rhetorically speaking, the figure of the sodomite and the Jewish man shared the same misogynistic burden as the woman, in addition to characteristics unique either to the female, the sodomite, or the male Jew stereotypes. As the woman, sodomite, and the Jew were negatively associated with the metamorphic nature of the stage – and, therefore, Ovid – they were thought to have the frightening potential to poison and contaminate audiences. This potent force was signified by the supreme figure of Ovidian metamorphosis and theatrical power: Proteus.14

Ovi d’s P ro t e u s a n d P ro b l emati c Mas culi ni ty In his Metamorphoses, Ovid significantly revises Proteus from Virgil’s and Homer’s treatments of him, rendering the god as the ultimate icon of transformation and aligning him with an oscillating, fluid notion of gender.15 Ovid’s Proteus becomes synonymous with change,

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his own identity bound up with the concept of “metamorphosis”: Ovid’s ultimate version of wisdom.16 Moreover, Ovid transfers the god’s “superpower” – his metamorphic ability – to female characters in need of escape from domination, thereby splitting the masculine figure of Proteus in two. The first female character to take on Proteus’s power, the daughter of Erysichthon (Book VIII), uses her changeability to elude the numerous masters to whom her father sells her. This tale thus underscores the interconnections between metamorphosis and sexual violence, with a focus on bodily change as a means of escape from abusive and traumatic circumstances. The second and most important of these figures, the sea nymph Thetis, fully takes on the role that Proteus plays in Virgil’s narrative from Georgics, Book IV (440-6), shifting the god’s powers to a female figure. In Virgil, Proteus morphs into various forms until he finally changes into his own. In Ovid’s version in Book XI of the Metamorphoses, however, it is Thetis who is the shape-shifter; and it is Proteus who supplies her predator, Peleus, with the key to catching his prey. Thetis’s protean transformations enable her to elude Peleus until, finally caught, she begrudgingly surrenders to his demands (XI. 260-5): But that shee chaungd from shape to shape, untill at length shee found Herself surprysd. Then stretching out her armes with sighes profound, She sayd: Thou overcommest mee, and not without the ayd Of God. And then she, Thetis like, appeerd in shape of a mayd. The noble prince imbracing her obeteynd her at his will, Too both theyr joys, and with the great Achylles did her fill. (XI. 297-302)17 In this 1567 translation, Golding inserts the phrase “to both thyr joys” (XI.302), most likely to smooth over the violence of the act.18 Nevertheless, the crucial departure that Ovid takes from his literary predecessor is clear: he separates the male Proteus into two figures – one female, the other male; one victim, the other the predator (by proxy). This rupture of the male god into two genders thus participates in the gendered positions and alternating roles of predator and victim – who is pursuing or controlling whom – that recur throughout the Metamorphoses, epitomized in the trope of the hunt. Through

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variations on the myth of Actaeon, who is changed into a stag and dismembered by his own hounds when, while hunting, he happens upon the Goddess Diana bathing, Ovid explores the fragile nature of masculinity.19 For Catherine Bates, Ovid’s rendition of this myth provided Petrarch and later lyric poets an alternative to the literary trope of the hunt as the cherished ritual of manhood, one that projected an abject, counter-masculinity.20 In Ovid, the positions of subject and object of desire (who hunts whom; who rapes whom; who mutilates whom) are in constant reversal and flux, as is gender identity. As Cora Fox explains, in Ovid “distinctions [of gender identity] are always on the verge of breaking down.”21 A god of contradictory perspectives, Ovid’s Proteus is thus the ultimate icon for genderfluid, queer masculinity and early modern theatricality, with its cross-­ dressing and conception as both negative and positive forces. As the icon of metamorphosis, Proteus permeates the text of The Jew of Malta, even though there are no direct references to him in the play. Although Proteus is not mentioned in the play, audiences would most likely have associated him with Marlowe’s Barabas. This implicit association is made explicit in the connection that Heywood makes between Proteus and Alleyn’s portrayal of Barabas in the s­ eventeenth century, noted above. In a highly meta-dramatic play like The Jew of Malta, Proteus, embodied by Barabas, was linked to the actor’s art of transformation as well as with the playwright’s skill of creation, both of which traffic in the staging of illusory and alternate realities. Proteus thus signified both the actor’s skills and those of “the auctor [or author],” which M.L. Stapleton has noted.22 In addition, Proteus was frequently cited and sighted on the early modern stage to embody types of Ovidian masculinity associated with changeability. Some examples include the rakish, deceitful man, such as Shakespeare’s character Proteus in The Two Gentlemen of Verona; the ambitious flatterer, courtier, and/or sodomite, such as Gaveston in Marlowe’s Edward II; or the sadistic Machiavellian villain/Vice figure, such as Richard III in both Henry VI, Part 3 and Richard III. In the former, Richard famously claims to that he “can add colours to the chameleon, / Change shapes with Proteus for advantages, / And set the murderous Machiavel to school” (III.ii.191-3).23 In the latter, Richard III’s deformity, perceived as a disability by the world around him, enables him to dominate other characters onstage as well as the audience off-stage, thereby endowing him with prowess and theatrical supremacy until he is vanquished in the end by the lackluster Richmond.24

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As a character in this tradition, Barabas’s stigma as a Jew in Christian Malta allows him to capitalize on his protean skills to do the same, albeit not for the goal of seizing and maintaining a throne, as does Richard, but rather for the sheer joy of challenging Christian ideals of masculinity and reveling in his theatrical villainy. As Jonathan Gil Harris puts it, “What gives The Jew of Malta much of its distinctive flavour is the protean power of its protagonist to change his shape, to assume a seemingly infinite number of personae in the pursuit of vengeance.”25 Just as Proteus signifies a potential for both transgressive and liberating metamorphosis, Barabas embodies genderfluidity, masculine creative energy, and dangerous excess. Responding to Ovid’s transfer of Proteus’s super-human power to female characters, Marlowe reallocates the protean gift back to a male character – Barabas – but one with an outcast, queer, Jewish masculine identity. In Marlowe’s play, Proteus’s skill to create and shape is thus fused with figures of the “damnable” male Jew and the theatre itself.

T h e J e w is h M a l e B o dy and Marlowe’s P ro t e a n   S tag e -Jew-Vi llai n Marlowe’s Barabas thus signifies the Jewish male Other, stereotypically characterized as a dissimulator who threatened Christian norms in early modern culture. Medieval anti-Semitic myths characterized Jews as duplicitous “actors” with sharp improvisational and roleplaying skills, as James Shapiro has fully documented.26 Barabas draws from these myths when he exclaims in a soliloquy, “We Jewes can fawne like Spaniels when we please; / And when we grin we bite, yet are our lookes / As innocent and harmelesse as a lambes” (II.iii.20-2),27 as well as from his many witty asides, which indicate his self-conscious playing and playwriting.28 Therefore, it is fitting that Marlowe represents Ovid’s genderfluid Proteus – who stands in for himself as dramatist and for the art of acting – as the Stage-JewVillain, a composite figure of the stereotype of the Jew-Devil, the medieval Vice, and the Machiavel.29 This character enables Marlowe to attack the residual medieval image of the Jew, as well as the Christian world that created it, while simultaneously fulfilling his audiences’ desire to revel in an anti-Semitic spectacle. In The Jew of Malta, Marlowe promotes identifications with the tortured and his torturers, positions that shift and, at times, overlap and potentially undercut one another. Primarily, audiences

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are allowed to indulge in the sadomasochistic plots that Marlowe – and Barabas – concoct. As Barabas pulls viewers in to engage in his criminal escapades, his Vice-like use of asides impedes any full identification with his victims. Nevertheless, Barabas becomes the target himself of the cultural fantasy of aggression directed against the outcast Jew, who exceeds even the Turks in his accumulative signification as Other. The episodic structure of the play works against any complete identification with Barabas as well, permitting spectators to participate in aggressive fantasies directed towards the Jew-as‑Other, while simultaneously allowing them to enjoy the vicarious thrill of Barabas’s own sadistic villainy. Marlowe creates his protean Stage-Jew Villain to be a consummate playwright and actor who personates or inhabits the character of a Jew-Devil, while rejecting an ontological identification of it as an actual devil. As described by Joshua Tractenberg, the Jew-Devil was “a creature of an altogether different nature,” sporting horns and a tail and exuding a noxious odour. A monstrous “diabolic beast fighting the forces of truth and salvation with Satan’s weapons,” the medieval Jew-Devil could not be classified according to dichotomous categories of gender.30 Although the Jew-Devil was imagined as a nonhuman fiend in both written texts and visual images, as Tractenberg explains, I argue that the figure would nevertheless have been read as masculine on stage. Even in medieval plays in which the character was costumed as the beastlike Jew-Devil, the monster would not have been perceived as an entirely inhuman “it” but rather, because portrayed by a male actor, a “he” imitating an “it” – albeit a “he” that could not be fixed into a normative concept of the male body or masculine gender. The medieval image of the Jew-Devil was carried forward into the early modern era and evolved into a figure exemplifying problematic gender identity and contradictory attributes. Anticipating what is now may be referred to as an “intersex” formation of the body,31 the early modern male Jew was thought to breast-feed and menstruate, his body breaching the boundary between masculine and feminine.32 Although representations of the castrated/castrating, menstruating, and breast-feeding male Jew were bound up with those of misogyny, the image was nevertheless male – in a transgressive way – and not identical to female. As an intersex male body with female characteristics and bodily functions, the figure, conceptualised as grotesque and monstrous, was accused of destabilising gender distinctions and threatening gender norms.

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This intersex yet predominantly male Jewish body was inextricably linked to Christian fears, misconceptions, and fascinations with circumcision inherited from medieval anti-Semitism. For Freud, this connection between circumcision and anti-Semitism is implicated in the castration complex, deeply enmeshed in the male subject’s anxious, fragile masculinity and its dependence on misogyny. He believed that the “castration complex is the deepest unconscious root of anti-­Semitism; for even in the nursery little boys hear that a Jew has something cut off his penis – a piece of his penis, they think – and this gives them a right to despise Jews. And there is no stronger unconscious root for the sense of superiority over woman.”33 This association of circumcision with castration and emasculation appears frequently in early modern anti-Semitic discourses describing the Jewish male body, the primary focus of these texts and also of other visual depictions – illustrations, paintings, engravings, sculpture – of “the Jew” in early modern culture. Because of circumcision, the male Jewish body could be more easily identified as “Jewish” – and, therefore, Other – than the female Jewish body. And because of that difference, it was stigmatized to a much higher degree than the Jewish female body in early modern culture. Characters like Abigall and Jessica in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (two examples of the “Jewish daughter convert plot”) can pass as Christian and assimilate, even if they are not fully welcome, into Christian culture.34 The male Jew, on the other hand, was imagined to be untrustworthy even after having converted, for the “mark” of Jewishness was irreversible, a physical sign damning him to hell in retribution for the death of Christ. This anti-Semitic image of the marked, damned, intersex Jew, conceived in opposition to Christian manhood, was invariably riddled with contradictions. Alongside the belief in the feminized, bleeding male body, for instance, Jewish men were thought to be insatiable predators who posed a constant danger to Christian women. Shapiro points out that “[c]ontemporaries apparently saw no contraction between these effeminized portraits and those that depicted Jewish men as rapacious seducers.”35 Such contradictory notions evolved over time in opposition to contemporary ideals of Christian masculinity, which shifted from that of the medieval knight to that of the early modern merchant, as Matthew Biberman has argued.36 Following and exceeding these traditions, Marlowe creates a StageJew-Villain that is – and is not – akin to the medieval Jew-Devil stereotype as well as to the genderfluid Ovidian Proteus. Barabas,

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although most likely costumed with hat, beard, and false nose on the early modern stage, would have appeared all too human – especially if played by Alleyn. In Marlowe’s text, his villain does not sport horns or a tail, nor does he hurl literal weapons from Satan. As Barabas reminds the audience, his male body is human and clean, in contrast to the stereotype of the “filthy Jew.” When Ithimore attempts to characterize Barabas as dirty, Barabas exclaims to the audience, “Oh raskall! I change my selfe twice a day” (IV.iv.73), which not only counters the insult, but also further suggests his association with Proteus. In line with this stereotype, the bleeding male Jewish body was thought to result in a foul smell, or foetor judaicus, which Barabas defies. If the myth of the “Jewish stench” was linked to male menstruation, as Ottavia Niccoli contends,37 then Barabas denies that accusation as well, cleverly reversing this stereotype by claiming that Christians, not Jews, reek. When Lodowicke asks Barabas why he is turning to leave, the villain retorts, No further: ’tis a custome held with us, That when we speake with gentiles like to you, We turne into the Ayre to purge our selves; For unto us the Promise doth belong. (II.iii.45-8). Here and elsewhere, Marlowe’s Stage Jew undermines the anti-Semitic image of the male Jewish body as disgusting, filthy, and rank-smelling. The character of Barabas destabilizes the binary of Christian/Jewish male in its parody of the Jew stereotype and its presentation of a male body that fails to conform fully to it. Nonetheless, Barabas does conform to another stereotype: the Jew as a deceiver who commits acts of violence against Christians. However this stereotype, drawn from Ovid’s Proteus, renders Barabas more, not less, powerful by endowing him with theatrical dexterity and satirical shrewdness. Since early modern Stage-Jews inherited the conventions of the medieval Vice – speaking directly to the audience and stealing the show with wickedly funny lines – they had great theatrical power, even when the action determined their destruction by the end of the play. Barabas self-consciously acknowledges this legacy at the slave market when he tells a slave “I’le buy you, and marry you to Lady Vanity if you doe well” (II.iii.117-18), taking on the role of the Judas or Vice figure on the medieval stage.38

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In Barabas’s contest of villainy with Ithimore, he trumps the Turk by cataloguing his many alleged past “careers”: a list of roles that portray him as a sadistic, hypermasculine, super-Jew-Devil. His resume of evil acts includes parts that he never could have played within his lifetime, including murdering of the infirm, well-poisoning, and other crimes for which Jews were typically falsely accused. He claims to have “studied physic” to learn how to poison in high-Italian Machiavellian style, then to have begun a career as an “Engineere” who, while ­pretending to aid Charles the Fifth, killed both “friend and enemy” (II.iii.187-90). Next, Barabas alleges to have taken on the profession of a “Userer” who, through underhanded tactics, ended up “fill[ing] the Jailes with Bankrouts in a yeare,” causing suicides and leaving children parentless. He caps off this list of triumphs with the anticlimactic statement that, now, “I have as much as coyne as will buy the Towne” (II.iii.191-201), a rather unsatisfying reward for such astounding offences. Barabas’s narrative of his notorious past displays Ovidian changeability, his former careers appearing to be past roles that he has played (or, rather, that he is pretending now to have played), all of which derive from anti-Semitic scripts that Marlowe is satirizing. Furthermore, since Barabas refers to these vocations as if they are parts that he has played onstage – like an actor whose type is the villain – they are even less believable, thus dismantling the antiSemitic stereotype not only in the off-stage reality of early modern culture but also in the on-stage, fictive reality of Marlowe’s play. If Edward Alleyn did wear the Stage Jew costume, it would have signified even further as Barabas’s own protean disguise that he dons while bragging about his imagined exploits to his sidekick, Ithimore. Moreover, the costume would have carried additional emblematic meanings for Marlowe’s audience, connections between the protean Stage Jew Villain, Ovid, and masculinity. Multiple references to Barabas’s nose – as when Ithimore replies that he will “worship” Barabas’s “nose for this” (II.iii.174), calls his master a “bottle-nos’d knave” (III.iii.10), exclaims “God-a-mercy-nose” (IV.i.25); and when Barabas remarks that he “smelt” the friars’ approach – not only reference the anti-Semitic image of the Jew but also the play’s link to Ovid and masculinity. Cheney makes the connection between Barabas’s nose and Ovid, while Stapleton develops it further, explaining that early modern writers often identified Ovid with a nose reference, punning on his name, Ovidius Nasso.39 I would add that, as is evident in countless phallic jokes about noses in early modern texts, Barabas’s

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false nose would have also evoked the image of the Jewish male body – with a reminder of circumcision and its associations – and related it to Ovid as well as to the outcast masculinity of the Jewish Other.

B a r a bas as t h e O u t c as t Male Jew Barabas displays a masculinity that resists early modern norms, in line with Ovid’s genderfluid characters – a kind of masculinity-onthe-margins. At the same time, he is driven primarily by an obsessive desire to create interior plays and to act in them. So, as both a male Jew and a protean actor, Barabas’s masculinity – bound up with his Jewish identity – deviates from dominant early modern culture, in Sarah Carter’s definition of the term “deviance” as non-procreative or normative. As she explains, early modern writers often employed Ovid’s myths to engage with issues surrounding “deviant” sexuality, ideology, and power relations, particularly in terms of gender.40 Marlowe’s Barabas is a perfect example of this tendency, personifying Ovid’s Proteus to explore deviant masculinity in relation to the intersex figure of the male Jew. Several critics have commented on Barabas’s masculinity, offering views that differ significantly from this reading of Barabas. Ian McAdam treats Barabas as aligned with outlaw masculinity through the figure of the sodomite; however, he views this connection as a symptom of Marlowe’s own sexual insecurities rather than an instance of Marlowe’s use of Ovid to conduct a larger cultural and aesthetic critique of masculinity and anti-Semitism, the perspective developed in this paper.41 Other critics see Barabas as either an example of predatory or hypermasculinity. Stapleton, for instance, sees Barabas as a staged incarnation of the desultor amoris – the womanizing, deluded, egoistic speaker of Ovid’s elegies, which Marlowe translated. Although, as Stapleton claims, Barabas does resemble the desultor in his duplicity, egocentrism, and other traits, I contend that Marlowe’s villain lacks the heterosexual drive of Ovid’s speaker in the elegies. Seemingly repulsed by sexuality in general, Barbaras exploits the heterosexual carnal desires exhibited by other characters, such as Mathias, Lodowicke, and the friars, to undo them.42 Like Stapleton, Biberman also stresses the villain’s masculinity, describing him as “hypermasculine,” but without any reference to Ovid. Drawing from Stephen Greenblatt’s comments about the “extravagance” of Barabas’s behaviour, Biberman maintains that

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Marlowe’s Stage-Jew exemplifies an excess of traditionally masculine traits such as “misogyny, contemptuousness, resourcefulness, cynicism, egotism, and avarice.”43 For Biberman, these traits contrast with those of the “Jew Sissy,” the stereotype of the Jewish male described by Daniel Boyarin, which Biberman describes as a later incarnation of the earlier Jew-Devil stereotype.44 I agree that Barabas exhibits some attributes that may be considered hypermasculine, but not others, and certainly not to the extent of Marlowe’s other truly hypermasculine characters. Barabas is no Tamburlaine, whose aim is to crush and conquer until he meets his unconquerable foe, Death. Marlowe couples the glorification of violent masculinity in his plays with an implicit critique of it; in some plays, this critique is more explicit. It is given a voice in the pacifist rebellion of Calyphas in Tamburlaine, Part II, and developed more fully in the relationship between Edward and Gaveston, which contrasts that of Mortimer and Isabella, in Edward II. As Jennifer C. Vaught puts it, “In Edward II Marlowe critiques the linking of masculinity with cold-hearted violence,” which she traces back to II Tamburlaine.45 Marlowe continues this challenge to hypermasculinity in The Jew of Malta. Inflicting cruelty does not seem to be the main drive that propels Barabas, even though he commits multiple brutal acts and relishes in them. Rather, protean playing and plotting appear to motivate his vicious actions. Since Barabas’s misdeeds are exaggerated, emphasizing the artificiality of the Jewish stereotype, they register as parts he plays rather than acts of a ruthless, hypermasculine warrior, conqueror, or villain. Conversely, Peter Berek sees Barabas in line with the “Jew as Renaissance man” – a merchant who makes his way in the emergent capitalist world via ingenuity rather than inherited wealth.46 However, Berek fails to take into account Barabas’s role-playing. Marlowe’s Stage-Jew-Villain initially does play the part of a Renaissance man – along with several other roles, such as that of the Jewish patriarch and father – but breaks out of it midway through the play. Therefore, he cannot serve as a true example of the Renaissance man.47 If anything, Marlowe uses this figure of the Renaissance Man, along with that of the Jewish usurer stereotype, as familiar set-ups for the protean Barabas, who morphs out of these roles once they no longer excite him. Just as Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus restlessly turns from one scholarly pursuit to the next because each field of study bores him, Barabas mutates from one role to the next because none of them satiate his desire to play characters and script scenes to achieve his

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ambition, which seems to be not revenge, but theatricality for its own sake. Barabas appears to be full of boundless energy and never-ending stratagems – that is, until he is out-witted by the Machiavellian Christian, Ferneze. As with many of Marlowe’s other Ovidian anti-heroes, Barabas’s behaviour is catastrophically self-destructive, leaving him vulnerable to the governor’s betrayal. In contrast to Marlowe’s other antiheroes, however, Barabas’s problematic masculinity derives from his identity as the “protean Jew.” His masculinity, outcast and contradictory rather than predatory and heterosexual, stems from Ovid – both through Proteus and the poet’s afterlife as the icon of theatre itself. Like Ovidian masculinity, the latter association is a somewhat vexed and complicated. Playacting was certainly a very male pursuit in the early modern era, characterized by masculine bravado; nevertheless, it was fraught with, or threatened by, anxiety and the taint of femininity. The actor was aligned with duplicity, deceit, disguise – attributes assigned to women rather than men in misogynistic discourses – and both were embedded in anti-Semitism, as noted above. So, as both a male Jew and a protean actor, Barabas may be seen as the ultimate Other, one whose masculinity – inextricably linked to his Jewish identity – transgresses and defies the gender norms inherent in early modern Christian culture. When Marlowe satirizes the popular image of the Jew-devil and energizes his Stage-Jew-villain through an association with Ovid’s Proteus, he is attacking the heroic ideal of Christian masculinity, revealing that ideal to be a façade, a cover for Machiavellian behaviour that is then projected onto the male Jew. This ideal is epitomised in the figures of the governor and his knights, whom Marlowe exposes as complete frauds through the initial early scene between them and the Jews (I.ii). Through Barabas (especially by means of his asides), Marlowe undermines the pretensions of the Christian governor and knights, along with the chivalric values associated with residual notions of knighthood. Ferneze overcomes Barabas at the play’s close, but in the process his Machiavellian ways shatter traditional Christian heroic ideals. Just as Marlowe undercuts these values by exposing the Christians’ hypocrisy, he dismantles ideal masculinity by juxtaposing seemingly heroic figures with Barabas, whose very presence, coupled with his wickedly sarcastic asides to the audience, undermines them. Barabas also reveals the friars’ greed and their hyper-heterosexuality, which they mask by vows to lead ascetic lives, in his suggestion that

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the friars annually impregnated the nuns, “For every yeare they swell, and yet they live” (II.i.vi). Barbara’s derisive comment is supported by the Second Fryar’s lust for Abigall, which he discloses in an aside that she dies “a Virgin, too, that grieves me most” (III.vi.41). Marlowe’s play exposes the monastic vow of chastity to be a sham, thereby mocking the Christian ideal of the chaste, holy body – male or female. Moreover, in the same way that Ovid satirizes the elegiac lover and derides the rigid ideals of Roman masculinity through his parodic speaker in Amores, Marlowe uses the outcast Jew to ridicule traditional heterosexual behaviour. Marlowe parodies heroic love through Don Lodowicke and Don Mathias’s jealous duel, Ithimore’s courtship of Curtezane (Bellamira), and Barabas’s role as the French musician. Abigall’s suitors, Don Lodowicke and Don Mathias, are vulnerable to Barabas’s machinations because of their own competition over Barabas’s daughter (I.iii), which is rendered foolish by Barabas’s facetious asides (II.iii). It is their rivalry that truly outdoes them, for it makes the young men susceptible to Barabas’s plot. Furthermore, the fact that their fatal duel is initiated by Barabas’s lies deflates that heroic, masculine ritual, making it appear to be both senseless and futile. Marlowe further critiques romantic conventions in his burlesque of Petrarchan love in Ithimore’s courtship of Curtezane, which includes a jab at himself as a poet of that tradition when Ithimore cites Marlowe’s own poem, “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” in the final lines of his love lyric parody: “Thou in those Groves, by Dis above, / Shalt live with me and be my love” (IV.ii.108-9; the full parody, 99-109). When Barabas appears in costume as a French musician while enacting his revenge against Ithimore’s betrayal, the Stage-Jew-Villain’s role as quasi-troubadour carrying poisonous messages becomes a perfect metaphor for Marlowe’s own role as Ovidian poet and playwright who contributed to those traditions both in that poem and in his epyllion, Hero and Leander. Like Ovid’s critique of Roman masculinity, Marlowe challenged early modern ideals of masculinity through his version of the StageJew-Villain in The Jew of Malta. A signature part for the famous Edward Alleyn, Barabas was linked by association with Marlowe’s Ovid as the ever-changing Proteus well into the seventeenth century. Like Shakespeare’s Richard III, Barabas was never truly vanquished on the early modern stage. Although he was boiled in a cauldron in a grisly anti-Semitic fashion by the scheming Ferneze at the end of the play, Barabas enjoyed an impressive afterlife. His gleeful plotting

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and acting, not Ferneze’s cold and rather dull Machiavellianism, are what charged the playhouse and its audience with creative and comic energy. Marlowe metamorphosed the Jew-Devil into a protean embodiment of Ovidian transgressive masculinity to represent the player’s craft and the playwright’s art in the potentially liberating yet dangerous house of illusions and shadows. Not e s   1

  2   3

  4

  5   6

  7

I am grateful to the editors of this volume, external readers, and Colby Gordon for their helpful feedback on drafts of this essay. Thomas Heywood, prologue in The Famous Tragedy of the Rich Jew of Malta, by Christopher Marlowe (London: Printed by J.B. for Nicholas Vavsour, 1633), A4 v. Heywood, epilogue in Jew of Malta, A4 v. I am using this term from contemporary transgender theory in reference to Ovidian masculinity, which involves gender shape-shifting, because this vocabulary – although anachronistic and not literally, or exactly, always applicable – can be productive in reading the transformational genders of Ovid’s characters. As Sara M. Deats and I have argued, The Jew of Malta is highly meta-­ theatrical, exploring both the creative energy of the stage and the dangers that anti-theatricalists claimed it posed. See Sara Munson Deats and Lisa S. Starks, “‘So neatly plotted and so well perform’d’: The Villain as Playwright in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta,” Theatre Journal 44.3 (October 1992): 375–89. Patrick Cheney, Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession: Ovid, Spenser, Counter-Nationhood (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997). I discuss this point more fully in reference to Julius Caesar in “Julius Caesar, Ovidian Transformation and the Martyred Body on the Early Modern Stage,” in Julius Caesar: A Critical Reader, Arden Early Modern Drama Guides, edited by Andrew James Hartley (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016), 103–24. Puritans regarded acting, or “metamorphosis,” as fiendishly deceptive, ­basing their argument on Deuteronomy 22:5, which they interpreted as a commandment forbidding the actor’s “metamorphosing” into “idolatrous […] brutish forms,” in Prynne’s words. William Prynne, Histrio-mastix. (London: Printed by Edward Allde, Augustine Mathewes, Thomas Cotes and William Iones for Michael Sparke, and are to be sold at the Blue Bible, in Greene Arbour, in little Old Bayly 1633), X4r.

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  8 Stephen Gosson, The Schoole of Abuse (Printed at London: for Thomas VVoodcocke, 1579), C1r-C2r.   9 Phillip Stubbes, Anatomy of Abuses, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall (London: N. Trubner and Co, 1877–9), 73 (F5 v). 10 John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 15–16. On this point, see also Ian McAdam, The Irony of Identity: Self and Imagination in the Drama of Christopher Marlowe (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999), 155. 11 Bruce R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A Cultural Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 196. McAdam also addresses this point in The Irony of Identity, 41. 12 William Prynne, A Short Demurer to the Jewes, 2 parts. (London: Edward Thomas, 1656). 13 Alexander Ross, Pansebeia, or a View of All Religions in the World (London: John Saywell, 1672); Shapiro discusses this view in depth, 8. 14 I deal with Ovid’s Protean transformation in relation to early modern ­acting or personation in “Ovidian Appropriations, Metamorphic illusion, and Theatrical Practice on the Shakespearean Stage,” in The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Global Appropriation, ed. Christy Desmet, Sujata Iyengar, and Miriam Jacobson (London and New York: Routledge, 2019), 398–408. 15 Proteus is cited in several places in Ovid’s Metamorphoses: VIII.731, XI.221, XI.255, XIII.918. 16 R.A. Smith points out that “mutability … is for Ovid spiritual knowledge.” See Poetic Allusion and Poetic Embrace in Ovid and Virgil (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 132. 17 Ovid’s Metamorphoses, trans. Arthur Golding (1567), ed. John Frederick Nims (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2000). 18 Golding’s translation changes the emphasis of Thetis’s charge that Peleus could never have attained her without a god’s help from one that belittles him to one that insinuates the divine destiny of their union; and the added phrase “[t]o both theyr joys” suggests that Thetis’s submission to Peleus culminates in a consensual, happy coupling, and that the struggle for ­dominance between the two is resolved in mutual consent and harmony. 19 See Lisa S. Starks-Estes, Violence, Trauma, and Virtus in Shakespeare’s Roman Poems and Plays: Transforming Ovid (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2014), 13–14. 20 Catherine Bates, Masculinity and the Hunt: Wyatt to Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 1–48. 21 Cora Fox, Ovid and the Politics of Emotion in Elizabethan England (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), 15, 9.

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22 Stapleton, Marlowe’s Ovid, 206. 23 Henry VI, Part 3, in The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works, ed. Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson, and David Scott Kastan (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). 24 Katherine Schaap Williams fully develops this point in “Enabling Richard: The Rhetoric of Disability in Richard II.” Disability Studies Quarterly 29.4 (Fall 2009): 10, 1–15. Education Source, EB SC Ohost, accessed 24 December 2017, http://dx.doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v29i4.997 25 Jonathan Gil Harris, Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 95. 26 See James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), esp. 20, 30, 156–7. 27 All citations from Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta are taken from The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, vol. IV: The Jew of Malta, edited by Roma Gill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). 28 See Deats and Starks, ‘“So neatly plotted,’” 375–89. 29 For a full discussion of the Stage-Jew, see Saskia Kinsser-Krys, The Early Modern Stage-Jew (Bern: Peter Lang, 2017); on The Jew of Malta, see 200–3. 30 Joshua Tractenberg, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Anti-Semitism (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1943 [1983 reprint]), 18. As Ruth Samson Luborsky explains, the Jew-Devil in early modern culture was pictured alongside “monsters, marvels, and repellent events.” Ruth Samson Luborsky, “The Pictorial Image of the Jew in Elizabethan Secular Books,” Shakespeare Quarterly 46.4 (Winter 1995): 449–53. According to Joel Carmichael, this figure emerged in later fifteenth-century in Germany; see Carmichael, The Satanizing of the Jews: Origin and Development of Mystical AntiSemitism (New York: Fromm, 1993), 50. Luborsky and Carmichael are cited and discussed more fully in Matthew Biberman, Masculinity, AntiSemitism, and Early Modern English Literature: From the Satanic to the Effeminate Jew (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 8–9. On the question of gender, see Tractenberg, Devil and the Jews, 18 and Biberman, Masculinity, Anti-Semitism, and Early Modern English Literature, 8. 31 As in note number 3 above, I claim that it can be helpful to use terminology from contemporary transgender studies in order to describe the phenomena of these representations of the Jewish male body. 32 For a full discussion of this topic, see Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews, 37.

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33 Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Works, trans. James Strachey et al., 24 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–75), vol. 1, PrePsychoanalytic Publications and Unpublished Drafts, 483; see also vol. 11, 95 and vol. 15, 165. Shapiro discusses Freud’s ideas on p. 114 and fully addresses the history of circumcision and anti-Semitism on pp. 113–30. 34 Shapiro discusses this point more fully in Shakespeare and the Jews, 120. 35 Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews, 38. 36 Biberman, Masculinity, Anti-Semitism, and Early Modern English Literature, 3. 37 Ottavia Niccoli, ‘“Monstruum Quasi Monstruum’: Monstrous Births and Menstrual Taboo in the Sixteenth Century,” in Sex and Gender in Historical Perspective, ed. Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 1–25, esp., 11; see also Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews, 37; and Biberman, Masculinity, ­Anti-Semitism, and Early Modern English Literature, 9. 38 Harris also makes this point in Foreign Bodies, 96 39 Cheney, Counterfeit Profession, 141; and Stapleton, Marlowe’s Ovid, 205. 40 I agree with Carter on the importance of the “range of ‘deviant’ sexual practices” in Ovid, but I disagree that they are ultimately contained by discourses that are “ideologically conservative” (Sarah Carter, Ovidian Myth and Sexual Deviance in Early Modern English Literature [Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011], 2, 7). Although some of these discourses are ideologically conservative, I argue that others offer possibilities of questioning that conservatism. 41 McAdam treats Barabas as aligned with the outlaw figure of the sodomite, although he views this connection as a symptom of Marlowe’s own sexual insecurities. See Irony of Identity, 146–74. 42 McAdam also makes this point. Ibid., 156. 43 Biberman, Masculinity, Anti-Semitism, and Early Modern English Literature, 18–19; and Stephen Greenblatt, “Marlowe, Marx, and AntiSemitism,” in Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1990), 46–7, 40–58. 44 Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 45 Jennifer C. Vaught, Masculinity and Emotion in Early Modern English Literature (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008), 74. 46 Peter Berek, “The Jew as Renaissance Man,” Renaissance Quarterly 51.1 (Spring 1998): 130, 128–62. 47 See Deats and Starks, “‘So neatly plotted and so well perform’d,’” 380–6.

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Envoy Lynn Enterline

“An agent, messenger, representative” “To send or dispatch” “A mission, errand” “A public minister” “The action of sending forth a poem; the author’s parting words; a dedication, postscript” (Oxford English Dictionary)

Moving from medieval French to English poetry, the persuasive closing figure of the “envoy” begins its career in Britain with Chaucer. The word stems etymologically from the Latin noun uia, for road, track, the fact of traveling and, eventually, a way of proceeding or method. It was one of Ovid’s favourite methods for bringing poems to an end. Several of Ovid’s narrators bid his or her text farewell, declare the author alive or dead, and send the written word forth as messenger by turning away from the narrative to deliver a formal address from writer to future readers. I discuss several of his closing gestures in this afterword, but my focus is on what they reveal about the status of masculinity and authorship in his most famous envoy, the closing lines of the Metamorphoses: Iamque opus exegi, quod nec Iovis ira nec ignis Nec poterit ferrum nec edax abolere vetustas. Cum volet, illa dies, quae nil nisi corporis huius Ius habet, incerti spatium mihi finiat aevi: Parte tamen meliore mei super alta perennis Astra ferar, nomenque erit indelebile nostrum,

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Quaque patet domitis Romana potentia terris, Ore legar populi, perque omnia saecula fama, Siquid habent veri vatum praesagia, vivam.1 And now my work is finished, which neither Jove’s wrath nor fire nor sword nor time’s hunger will be able to destroy. When it will, let that day come which has power over nothing but my body and put an end to the precarious span of my life: and yet, the better part of me will be carried above the lofty stars, and my name will not be erased, and wherever Rome’s power extends over conquered lands, I will be read on the lips of the people, and if the prophecies of bards are true, through every age in fame I shall live. The resonances of this parting maneuver were lost on very few early modern writers, producing a range of reactions – the most wellknown being that of Francis Meres who, in Palladis Tamia, takes up the Pythagorean idea of metempsychosis (which Ovid echoes in lines 871-2) to declare that Ovid’s “witty soul” lives in “honey-tongued Shakespeare.”2 As signature, gesture of authorship, rhetorical trope, and ostensible bid for fame as perpetual written presence (indelebile, “not to be erased”) as well as vocal presence (ore legar populi, “I will be read on the lips of the people”), Ovid’s imperial envoy offers an apt conclusion to a volume of essays that traces his poetic afterlife as it affects early modern thinking about the connections among poetry, authorship, readership, and masculinity. What impact did his textual “messengers” have on early modern representations – and experiences – of masculinity? I dare include “experiences” alongside “representations” because Ovid’s mythographic poetry moved from the intellectual and aesthetic domain of literary history into the pedagogical regime of the Tudor classroom. As some of the most prominent texts in the humanist curriculum, Ovid’s poems were engrained in the repetitive grammar school practices of imitatio that were designed to intervene in the social reproduction of English “gentlemen.” Early modern appropriations of Ovid therefore exercised more than conceptual and poetic influence, as several authors in this volume explore. They also entered the shaping world of early educational practice. As a repetitive, performative regime (in Judith Butler’s sense) that materializes conceptual gendered schemes in bodily disposition and action, Latin grammar school

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instruction imported Ovidian forms into the unpredictable metamorphosis we now call puberty.3 George Sabinus’s commentary on the Metamorphoses, commonly used in Tudor schools, doubles down on Ovid’s closing fantasy of his own phonographic survival by means of having his written text spoken out loud: Sabinus glosses the nine-line envoy as “peroratio,” the concluding section of an orator’s speech which was long associated with pathos, the business of evoking emotion from an audience. This school text thereby passes along the fiction, “I shall live on the lips of the people” (ore legar populi … vivam [XV.878]) to young male orators learning from it what one must feel, write, and say to be persuasive, to exert influence on the world. Sabinus’s “peroratio” links poetry to oratory by endorsing Ovid’s fantasy of an address to readers that is both written and voiced. And this joint performance lays claim to enduring presence, force, fame, and life. For those who take assertions of masculine agency and power at face value, Ovid’s epic may seem to alter that genre’s conventions aggressively by introducing a cast of thousands and therefore leaving the poet, rather than a warrior, as hero.4 To those educated by teachers who gave Virgil pride of place as “prince of all poets”5 (and saved the Aeneid for boys to read, memorize, and imitate in the final form at school), the implied equivalence between epic warrior and epic poet might make sense. And indeed, Ovid’s envoy does resemble the kind of formal boast that heroes make – using “voice rather than … body” to “impress” themselves “upon the world.”6 Epic heroes (like Pindar’s Olympic victors) anticipate a “song of praise that faithfully remembers high deeds of the past” in which “the poetic word … snatches them from the anonymity of death.”7 Certainly Arthur Golding stressed the imperial tenor of the boast: “For looke how far so ever / The Romane Empyre by the ryght of conquest shall extend, / So farre all folke reade this woork.” But for some readers, “Siquid habent veri vatum praesagia” (“if the prophecies of bards have any truth”), might recall Ovid’s far more skeptical, comic use of “bard” (vates) in Amores 1.1.24, which was his way to satirize epic (specifically Virgilian) claims that the poet is a “seer,” prophet, or visionary. And for many others, attuned to the poem’s central idea of metamorphosis, in which all identities, bodies, and cities succumb to constant change -and are subject to threat of a return to chaos – categories like “masculinity” and “the poet” as coherent identities, whether as “word,” “song,” or “voice,” are unlikely to emerge intact. As Catherine

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Bates succinctly puts it, “one might describe the Metamorphoses as a veritable assault on category.”8 And though not often remembered as vividly as it might be, Eleanor Winsor Leach pointed out many years ago that poets and artists (male or female) in Ovid’s poem do not fare well: it is the failure and danger of artistry in all media that the poem repeatedly documents, right alongside the shattering effects of such failure on the bodies of its singers, artists, weavers, and writers.9 Consider, for example, Orpheus, Daedalus, Arachne, Marsyas, and Byblis. And indeed, despite the envoy’s apparent epic boast – its proposed equivalence between authorial power and Rome’s imperial power – another, darker undercurrent evokes precisely the kind of “precarity” that the editors’ introduction and several essays in this volume uncover in Ovidian representations of manhood. To begin with, as Leonard Barkan astutely argued, the putative “prophecy” that links undying authorial presence to Rome’s eternal power over conquered territories rings hollow in an epic that narrates the rise and fall of so many other cities – collective identities having been subject as much as individual ones to the doctrine of perpetual change.10 At the end of such a poem, at least a few readers would be alert to the incongruity of tying one’s permanence to Rome’s imperium. And so, too, might they be alert to the resonances between the poet’s envoy and his epitaph, carved into a tombstone – a funereal, parting gesture Ovid uses several times over the course of his career. For example, and by contrast to Dido’s thundering silence in Book VI of the Aeneid, Ovid’s Dido concludes her letter to Aeneas in the Heroides by suggesting that the hand that wrote the letter will soon turn a different instrument against its author. Drawing her epistolary drama to a close, Dido points to the embodied scene of letter writing (her hand, her cheek, her lap, her tears, her blood) – Scribimus, et gremio Troicus ensis adest, Perque genas lacrimae strictum labuntur in ensem, Qui iam pro lacrimis sanguine tinctus erit I write and the Trojan blade is here in my lap, And tears fall from my cheeks onto the naked sword, Which soon will be stained with blood instead of tears (VII.184-6)

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only to send the letter forth by quoting the following epitaph as poem’s envoy: hoc tantum in tumuli marmore carmen erit: praebuit Aeneas et causam mortis et ensem; ipsa sua Dido concidit usa manu (VII.194-6) This poem/song will be on the marble of my tomb: Aeneas gave her the reason, and the sword, for her death; Dido fell by her very own hand. As in the concluding lines of the Metamorphoses, written text replaces the writer’s body when the envoy doubles as a funerary inscription. Alongside what Barkan aptly calls the “political irony” of Ovid’s envoy in Book XV, I therefore argued for an accompanying personal and authorial irony.11 In the closing lines, as elsewhere in Ovid’s poetry (Heroides 2, Amores 1.15 and 2.7), the narrator revisits the inscription on Ennius’s tomb (“living, I fly through the mouths of men”) and Horace’s “exegi monumentum” (III.30) to put ancient ritual practice to use: Romans, used to reading texts out loud, inherited the Greek custom in which epitaphs told the passerby to stop, give a voice to the name on the tomb, and thus momentarily lend the deceased breath and life.12 It is, of course, the custom that eventually gave rise to Shakespeare’s conceit, “your monument shall be my gentle verse,” because that monument will find “where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men” (sonnet 81). Making us as aware as Derrida that spoken utterances as well as a written texts are citational, and made to do without their author,13 Ovid’s poem evokes what I have called a “phonographic imaginary” in its closing lines: the fantasy that future voices will read his written text out loud as if it were a funerary monument, letting the author “live.” It is a fantasy that turns readers of the Metamorphoses into Ovid’s echo.14 His textual representative thus extends to the human voice the differential movement, and iterative structure, that Derrida claims has been, since Plato, overwhelmingly associated with writing.15 Most important for the purposes of this volume, however, Ovid’s Metamorphoses repeatedly turns semiotic and rhetorical predicaments into erotic dramas where speakers and writers fail to impress

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themselves upon the world, thereby drawing attention to unexamined assumptions about an inevitable connection between masculinity and authorial agency. Jenny C. Mann’s analysis of Orpheus’s vulnerability to Bacchic noise is a case in point – “the stones” thrown by the Bacchae “grew red with the blood of the bard whose voice went unheard” (saxa / non exauditi rubuerunt sanguine vatis, XI.18-19). As funeral monuments, stones may work in the service of a collective cultural fantasy about vivifying the dead, but they can also become weapons that turn against the very singer who once animated them. In either case, they are signs pointing to the poet’s death. And as other stories trace – Zeus and Semele, Apollo and Phaethon, or Cephalus and Procris (among others) – voices in Ovid’s poem, which itself begins with the fiction that the writer is singing a “perpetual song” (perpetuum carmen), produce effects that are as capricious as those associated with written texts. Gods as well as humans utter words that exceed intentions, baffle their speakers, wander from their mission, are drowned out, or turn against the body doing the speaking (or listening). In Ovid’s hands, spoken words as much as written texts are “made to do without me.” Or worse. As Cephalus discovers, for example, a heart-felt poem of gratitude can turn lethal: his spontaneous lyric of thanks to the cooling breeze, “aura,” is overheard, misinterpreted, passed along to his wife as an address to a personified lover, Aura. That misreading prompts Procris to run to find him in the woods; surprised by her gasp of pain when she hears him praising aura/Aura, Cephalus (a hunter) believes he has found prey and accidentally shoots his own wife (7.694 ff and Ars amatoria 3.686 ff). The various significations of “envoy” traced in the Oxford English Dictionary lend a personified agency to an author’s parting words: it is a “messenger” or “representative” of its author, one whose brief is to complete a “mission” or “errand” on the author’s behalf. The idea that a text can extend a writer’s presence and power into the future made the envoy a persuasive fiction. It clearly appealed to some early modern men educated according to the humanist belief in a continuum between symbolic effects and masculine, martial action: witness, for example, the frontispiece to George Gascoigne’s Stele Glass, pen on one side of the author’s portrait, firearm on the other. But when Ovid’s own character, Echo, surfaces in the envoy as the principle of the author’s survival – “I shall be read on the lips of the people” – her predicament darkens the epic boast, as well as the kind of “life,” asserted. The narrator’s survival, however palpable, is far from personal. And

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certainly not reducible to singular “agency”: as Narcissus asks in reaction to her echoing replies, “Is anyone here?” (equis adest? 3.380). If we remember that story, the echo in Ovid’s envoy poses a question: Might an author not recognize his or her own work when echoed by another? Subject to the appropriations of future readers and speakers, Ovid’s narrator anticipates an oddly impersonal future for “the better part of me.” The proximity between Echo’s situation and her narrator’s haunts the poet’s activity as a writer who collects and reuses what Shakespeare would call “antique books” in ways that preserve, by citing and (mis)appropriating, the words of others. As the figure in the poem who best suits the narrator’s final claim, “Ore legar populi … vivam,” Echo casts a shadow over the author’s ostensible representative, reminding us how often in the Metamorphoses signifying missions go strangely, dangerously awry. I proposed in The Rhetoric of the Body that Echo is one of the many characters – male and female – who serve as surrogate figures for Ovid’s narrator. It seems to me that she resurfaces in the envoy because her story so precisely delineates the spectrum of possibilities that Ovid explores across his poem when interrogating what it means to be an author while inhabiting a vulnerable, speaking and writing body. Her story, which takes up the degree-zero challenge of languageas-repetition, veers between a dream of triumphant agency on the one hand and anxiety about utter self-evacuation on the other, between a fantasy about speaking one’s mind despite the structures of language and movement of literary history and a stark recognition that language’s mechanical and transpersonal operations are not anyone’s to control. Recently, a number of classical scholars have begun to argue that repetition is, in fact, a crucial principle of Ovidian invention: “he repeats himself … both thematically … and lexically, via reuse of noteworthy phrases” so that his epic (a genre long noted for repe­ titiveness) returns to certain themes, problems, and phrases again and again, challenging us to read “difference-within-similarity” and “similarity-within-difference.” Once dismissed as a sign of “frivolity,” Ovid’s modes of repetition are being taken seriously in this current strain of classical scholarship “as a deliberate stylistic device.”16 The editors of Repeat Performances therefore offer Echo’s story as a “case study” in Ovid’s poem-long engagement with repetition, with the predicaments facing “any artist-who-comes-after,” and as a revealing index of the continuum between a woman “speaking her voice against all odds” and a voice that resonates (re-sonabilis) only “with the

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annihilation of her own model, and of her own body.”17 As many early modern Ovidian poets were made keenly aware by their own early training in Latin imitatio, it is no small literary and theoretical matter that Ovid styles himself as an author whose survival, whose “better part” and “unerasable name,” hangs on echoes. Given that Echo is a nymph, the questions about authorship he bequeathed to early modern writers hang on the utterance of a “female” speaker. As essays in this volume stress, Ovid offers abundant material for later writers experimenting with, and testing the limits of, the connections between authorship and gender. What continues to fascinate me is how often Ovid and those who imitated him take up his interrogation of authorship by adopting the voices of “women” (whether human, goddess, or nymph). We have just seen how Ovid reconfigures the idea of the envoy-as-epitaph to depict his own condition, as an author with a speaking and writing body, but also that of the suicidal, letter-writing Dido. To take another example of his tendency to refract the predicaments of the signifying body through a female author: Byblis (whose name comes from the Greek noun for “book”) discovers the law against incest at the moment she imagines violating it. True to her name, she shifts from castigating herself for erotic transgression to blaming the letter she has written to her twin brother for her predicament: Et tamen ipsa loqui, nec me committere cerae Debueram, praesensque meos aperire furores. (IX.601-2) And yet I myself ought to have spoken, not trusted wax tablets and revealed my passion in person. Her parallel verbs make writing and sexual transgression equivalent: “et scripsi et petii” (“And I wrote and I pleaded,” 627). Reading the programmatic dimensions of Byblis’s story alongside Echo’s, we  see  that in Ovid’s hands, semiotic and rhetorical dilemmas are not medium specific. Whether written or spoken, signs in the Metamorphoses easily turn against their authors, evacuating commonsense ideas about language as mere instrument while at the same time emphasizing that its force can outstrip, even destroy, embodied as well as intentional “presence.” Echo, Byblis, Dido: these three tales concern “female” characters struggling, and failing, to use words to impress themselves upon

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someone else. Ovid’s habit of revealing the potential for violence that attends the act of becoming a poet, writer, or singer by ventriloquising an array of “female” emotions is notable. And it transmitted a significant practice of transgendered cross-voicing to early modern England. Imbibed in the context of all-male grammar schools that taught his texts while also inculcating the techniques of transvestite theatricals and other rhetorical modes of cross-voicing,18 Ovid’s talent for female impersonation unleashed on the early modern world any number of classically-educated male writers fascinated by, and with a talent for imitating, female voices by echoing and re-appropriating texts from the ancient past. For example, many Ovidian imitators in the 1590s wrote epyllia that drew inspiration from the grammar school technique of legislatio (or “in utramque partem” arguments “on either side of the question”). It was a rhetorical scheme designed to benefit future law students. But epyllia stage such debates in poems that personify both sides, staging them as an argument between a male and a female “speaker”: Venus and Adonis; Lucrece and Tarquin; Paris and Oenone; Salmacis and Hermaphroditus. One could easily rename these epyllia Venus v. Adonis, Paris v. Oenone, Lucrece v. Tarquin, etc., to indicate that Ovidian cross-voicing and training in forensic rhetoric emerged from shared institutional spaces and practices. Ovid’s category-defying epic – with its stories about the exuberant, polymorphous perversity of amor across genders and species and its cast of liminal, gender-shifting, in-between bodies (Tiresias, Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, Iphis and Ianthe, Caenis) – met the cross-voiced practices of early modern rhetorical training. That intersection inspired poetic fictions that continued to test the limits of a binary distinction between “masculinity” and “femininity” and received hetero-erotic conventions. As Georgia Brown comments, Elizabethan minor epics often “acknowledge a fluidity between male and female desires,” between “male and female identities” by “creating parallels between the tactics employed by authors of those literary texts and those conventionally ascribed to women.”19 Minor epic writers are quite happy to remind readers that they learned such fluidity from Ovid. Earlier I wrote, “for those who take assertions of masculine agency and power at face value,” and I did so for another pressing, contemporary reason. Which is: the tendency to take Ovid’s assertions of authorial presence and agency straight, to elide Ovid’s many ironies, has emerged recently on the internet. In ways that remind me of the urban legend that there were people who at first thought Stephen

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Colbert was in fact a conservative pundit, writers in the far right “manosphere” have been asserting a universal, essential, and predatory masculinity by taking the Ars amatoria as an ancient “how-to” manual that supports current pick-up artists who want to teach others how to do their work. This sinister turn in Ovid’s digital reception – which Donna Zuckerburg wittily, if chillingly, dubs “the Ovid Method” – makes the topic and the various anti-foundational critiques of masculinity in this volume all the more timely and urgent. Citing Ovid (among other ancient writers), these self-styled instructors try to lend “a veneer of intellectual authority and ancient wisdom” to their work, spreading the “technique” (or ars) of the pick-up “artist” to other men by instructing readers to violate women’s boundaries, to assume “no” means “yes,” or to bypass questions of consent altogether.20 A razor-thin veneer of “intellectual authority,” I might add, since taking Ovid straight means that they are neither reading his poetry with a minimal degree of attention nor understanding much, if anything, about the historical parameters within which he decided to adopt the Ars’ unforgettable narrative persona. With respect to the narrator’s tone, for instance, these internet “teachers” miss Ovid’s none-too-subtle warning at the opening of Book 2 about the dangers of poet-reader, teacher-student relations. In it, a digression on the narrator’s own skill sets up an analogy between the praeceptor amoris (“love’s teacher”) and the virtuosity of the renowned artist, Daedalus. Narrating the story of that disastrous flight alongside his boast that his “ship of poetry” will take readers on a journey across the waves to another shore, Ovid circumscribes his initial self-assertion with a disconcerting message for his male students/ readers: following the guidelines of this praeceptor amoris may be as effective in helping you reach that promised shore as the lesson in the art of flying Icarus took from his father. Book 2 opens by turning, in 100 quick lines, from cries of triumph about the reader’s and the poet’s pedagogic journey – Dicite io Paean et io bis dicite Paean (2.1) – to cries of grief as a father realizes that his own art and his own lessons have lost him his son: Icare, clamat, ubi es … Icare, clamabat, pinnas aspexit in undis (“Icarus he cries, where are you? … Icaraus, he cried, and saw the feathers on the water,” 2.94-6). In Metamorphoses Book X, Apollo transforms Midas’s ears into those of an ass to signify his stupidity, his poor taste, and his inability to listen carefully to poetic song. It seems a fitting metamorphosis to bring to bear on the self-styled Ovidian instructors in the “manosphere,” since they neither hear the warning in the narrator’s digression on

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Daedalus and Icarus nor have finished reading the poem. The envoy to the Ars ought to give them pause. Once again, Ovid concludes with a boast to readers – this time, female readers: Lusus habet finem …. Ut quondam iuvenes, ita nunc, mea turba, puellae Inscribant spoliis “Naso Magister erat” Our game is at an end … As once the young men did, so now let my crowd of young women inscribe on their spoils, “Naso was master.” (3.811-12) The “spoils” in this case are the men on whose bodies the texts of Ovid’s name and assertion of mastery are to be “inscribed” by the female warriors who have conquered them. This is a magister who purports to instruct both genders in the art of militia amoris – “love” represented as warfare because it was an impudent rebuff to Roman military life. As Megan O. Drinkwater summarizes, “The pose … adopted by the Roman elegists, that they were soldiers of Amor rather than of Roma, was a rejection of Romanitas itself, and more specifically the Romanitas promoted by the emerging princeps, Augustus.”21 Reversing the love-soldier’s gender in the poem’s final book, Ovid connects the closing lines of Book 2 (erotic advice to iuvenes) with the opening lines of Book 3 (erotic advice to puellae) by alluding to Penthesilea and the Amazons, whom the narrator instructs to “go into battle on equal terms” (Ite in bella pares, 3.3). Understood in its ancient Roman context, the impertinent idea of soldiering in the arms of a lover – whether that soldier be male or female – allowed Ovid and fellow elegists to propose alternative careers to the military one required to maintain an empire. Of course, the fact that two can play the “game” of sexual predation (lusus, 3.809) does nothing to undermine the unequal conventions and distribution of power underpinning what remains, deliberately, a hyperbolically hetero-sexist game throughout the poem. Ovid turns from one gender stereotype to another, putting them to contradictory, comic use. But to understand why Ovid inflates the gender roles and sexual relations at the heart of militia amoris into hyperbole means considering, as do the essays in this volume, the historically specific contexts and discourses within and against which Ovid and Ovidian imitators were restaging and exploring the relationship between

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masculinity and authorship in their own literary and social moments. Apart from engaging with the long durée of ancient epic, which inscribes a capacious spectrum of rape-as-theft to rape-as-sexualviolation at the origins of the European literary tradition, and with the more proximate forms of martial masculinity freed from amor in the Aeneid, Ovid wrote his Ars in the moral-political climate of the Augustan family laws (leges Iuliae).22 This is not the place for fully engaging what would be a complex literary-historical discussion about the competing ideologies, representations, and realities of gender in Rome. My point here is simply that in today’s climate, it is crucial for those who teach ancient and early modern literary texts to revive a lesson that may no longer go without saying because it is being all too quickly erased: that it does make a difference to attend to the culturally and historically specific, as well as variable, discourses and practices within which Ovidian (and more broadly, classical) representations of masculinity gained currency, lost it, or inflected later cultural constructions and debates. And to do so, moreover, in detail and with special attention to what Althusser called “internal distance” – his proposition that it is possible for a text to “presuppose a retreat” or “internal distantiation” from the ideology to which it “alludes and with which it is constantly fed.”23 For far right, under-read teachers of sexual predation with Midas ears for irony and hyperbole, Ovidian “masculinity” is straight, rapacious, essential, unchanging. As I hope my essay and this volume suggest, these internet imitators do not understand what they are reading, nor care what they are doing. One final irony in the closing lines of Ovid’s Ars may give the poem the last laugh, if we pause to remember it. Right before asserting his triumph as “magister amoris,” the narrator gives advice about the best positions for women to take in bed for purposes both aesthetic and sexual. Wishing that both lovers enjoy orgasm at the same time, the narrator suddenly adds Tu quoque, cui veneris sensum natura negavit, Dulcia mendaci gaudia finge sono. Infelix, cui torpet hebes locus ille, puella, Quo pariter debent femina virque frui. Tantum, cum finges, ne sis manifesta, caveto: Effice per motum luminaque ipsa fidem. Quam iuvet, et voces et anhelitus arguat oris … (III.797-803)

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And you to whom nature denies the pleasures of Venus, fake the sweet delights with lying sound. Unlucky is the young woman for whom that place is numb, one that both woman and man ought to enjoy equally. Only, when you fake it, take care you are not caught: win trust through your movements and your eyes. Both voice and breath prove what pleasure you take … The “master’s” concession may be brief, but it echoes other incongruities, other moments in the Ars that lay bare how far the fictions of male sexual “victory” depend upon female recognition and cooperation – moments which sometimes put puellae on top. For example, an important trick to the “art” the narrator teaches is that his male acolyte should follow his mistress’s lead in all things – as early moderns would see it, to hone the art of imitation. Let your mistress be your praeceptor: Cede repugnanti: cedendo victor abibis: Fac modo, quas partes illa iubebit, agas. Arguet, arguito; quicquid probat illa, probato; Quid dicet, dicas; quod negat illa, neges. Riserit, adride; si flebit, flere memento; Imponat leges vultibus illa tuis (II.197-202) When she resists, yield; by yielding you will leave the victor: only play the part that she bids you play. Argue when she argues; approve when she approves. What she says, you say too; what she denies, you deny. When she laughs, laugh; if she cries, remember to weep. Let her lay down the laws for your facial expressions. As a rhetorician, Ovid was trained in the art of addressing contingent circumstances, and this is advice about learning to adopt roles that respond to contingency. Repeated parallelism and apposition pose and repose the question about the “laws” of eros: just who makes the laws, and who is “victor” here?24 When Naso magister admits, immediately before his triumphal envoy, that some women just don’t feel it, he gestures to problems unaccounted for by the either-or of hetero-normative warfare that structures the poem’s fictional send up of Romanitas and militarism. First: that for some women reading his advice about love, the

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whole “game” is a bore – and that their pleasures may well lie elsewhere. Who knows where? Second: members of the unmoved audience of women who are “numb” to love’s pleasures may not be mere readers of the poem, but rather fellow erotic warriors (and fiction-makers) encountered in the teacher’s bed. So why take a lesson in ars amatoria from him? Third: as manifest in so many other poems, Ovid’s narrator depends on female fiction-making to practice the “art” he claims to  teach. What other relationships might pertain between them besides  pitched battle? And fourth: the self-parodic request (or plea?), “keep on deceiving us and be sure not to get caught,” underlines what becomes increasingly clear over the course of the poem’s three books: that for Ovid’s praeceptor, the “art” of sexual warfare is a stealth battle. Ars amatoria, as lived experience and as poetic work, turns out to be an intricate cloth woven out of mutually sustaining (and thus mutually imploding) fictions. “On both sides thus is ­simple truth suppressed”: so the narrator of Shakespeare’s sonnets puts it when revisiting the closing idea of the Ars. “Therefore I lie with her, and she with me, / And in our faults by lies we flattered be” (138.13-14).

Not e s   1 XV.871-9. All citations are from Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. Frank Justus Miller, rev. G.P. Goold, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1916). I have silently modified the translations.   2 The envoy repeats prominent figures from the speech of Pythagoras on metempsychosis earlier in Book XV. Clearly designed to rival Lucretius’s Empedocles, Pythagoras instructs humans not to fear death because while “fire” and “hungry time” (tempus edax) may destroy bodies, souls (animae) “lack death” (XV.156-8 and 234-6). Tempus edax and the ­doctrine of anima surviving constant change (“like the rush of wave on wave”) resurface prominently in Shakespeare’s sonnets.   3 For further discussion, see Lynn Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), chapters 1 and 2.   4 Charles Segal, “Ovid: Metamorphosis, Hero, Poet,” Helios 12 (1985): 57, 49–63.   5 Thomas Elyot, The Boke Named the Governor, ed. Donald W. Rude (New York: Garland Press, 1992), 19.

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Envoy 301   6 Sheila Murnaghan, “Body and Voice in Greek Tragedy,” Yale Journal of Criticism 1:2 (1988): 25, 23–43.   7 Jean Paul Vernant, “Dim Body, Dazzling Body,” Fragments for a History of the Human Body,” ed. Michel Feher, vol. 1 (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 33.   8 Bates, “Abject Authorship,” 48.   9 Eleanor Winsor Leach, “Ekphrasis and the Theme of Artistic Failure in Ovid’s Metamorphoses,” Ramus 3.2 (January 1974): 102–42. 10 See Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 87. 11 See Enterline, The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 12 For further discussion see Jesper Svenbro, Phrasiklea: anthropologie de la lecture en grèce ancienne (Paris: Editions la Découverte, 1988). 13 See Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman and Samuel Weber, ed. Gerald Graff (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1977), 13–21. 14 See Enterline, The Rhetoric of the Body, 56–61. 15 See Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (London: Athlone Press, 1972), 61–156. 16 Repeat Performances: Ovidian Repetition and the Metamorphoses, ed. Laura Fulkerson and Tim Stover (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016), 13–15. 17 Ibid. 18 See Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom, passim. 19 Georgia Brown, Redefining Elizabethan Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 108. For further discussion, see my introduction, “On Schoolmen’s Cunning Notes,” in Elizabethan Narrative Poems: The State of Play (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019). 20 Donna Zuckerberg, Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age (Cambridge, M A: Harvard University Press, 2018). 21 Megan O. Drinkwater, “Militia Amoris: Fighting in Love’s Army,” in The Cambridge Companion to Latin Love Elegy, ed. Thea S. Thorsen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 194, 194–206. 22 See Alessandro Barchiesi, “Women on Top: Livia and Andromache,” in The Art of Love: Bimillennial Essays on Ovid’s Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris, ed. Roy Gibson, Steven Green, and Alison Sharrock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 96–120. 23 Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological Apparatuses,” Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 222.

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24 Drinkwater observes that Ovid again challenges the codes of Romanitas by exploring the dynamics of militia amoris in the Heroides from the female perspective: “In the nascent principate, after Rome had been so badly scarred by a generation or more of civil war, offloading covert military critiques onto women is both shockingly bold and deceptively safe. Shifting the first-person narrator from an “I” easily identified with a male poet to an “I” that is clearly both fictional and female allows a poet critical of Augustus to speak from a safe distance (“Militia Amoris,” 206).

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Contributors

Catherine Bates is Research Professor in the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at the University of Warwick. She is the author of On Defending Poetry: Defence and Indefensibility in ­Sidney’s Defence of Poesy (Oxford University Press, 2017, winner of The Elizabeth Dietz Memorial Award, Rice University, 2019) and Masculinity and the Hunt: Wyatt to Spenser (Oxford University Press, 2013, winner of the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Prize, 2015). Some of her other books include Masculinity, Gender and Identity in the English Renaissance Lyric (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and the Rhetoric of Courtship in Elizabethan Language and Literature (Cambridge University Press, 1992). She has edited The Cambridge Companion to Epic (Cambridge University Press, 2010). Sa r a h C a rt e r is a lecturer at Nottingham Trent University and the author of Ovidian Myth and Sexual Deviance in Early Modern English Literature (Palgrave, 2011). L y n n E n t e r l i n e is Nancy Perot Chair Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press, 2000), and The Tears of Narcissus: Melancholia and Masculinity in Early Modern Writing (Stanford University Press, 1995). She is the editor of Elizabethan Narrative Poems: The State of Play (Bloomsbury, 2019). John S. Garrison is an associate professor of English at Grinnell College. His books include Friendship and Queer Theory (Routledge,

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2014), Glass (Bloomsbury, 2015), and Shakespeare and the Afterlife (Oxford University Press, 2019). He is co-editor, with Kyle Pivetti, of Sexuality and Memory in Early Modern England: Literature and the Erotics of Recollection (Routledge, 2015) and co-editor with Emma Depledge and Marissa Nicosia of Making Milton (Oxford University Press, 2020). Jenny C. Mann is associate professor in the Department of English and Gallatin School of Individual Study at NYU. She received her BA from Yale University and her PhD from Northwestern University. In addition to Outlaw Rhetoric: Figurative Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare’s England (Cornell University Press, 2012), she has published articles in English Literary Renaissance, The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Modern Philology, Philological Quarterly, Renaissance Drama, and Studies in English Literature, as well as various edited collections. She co-edited, with Debapriya Sarkar, a special issue of Philological Quarterly titled Imagining Early Modern Scientific Forms. She is currently completing a book project titled “The Trials of Orpheus: Poetry, Science, and the Early Modern Sublime.” I a n F r e d e r i c k M o u lto n is professor of English and cultural history in the College of Integrative Sciences and Arts at Arizona State University. He is a cultural historian and literary scholar who has published widely on the representation of gender and sexuality in early modern European literature. His most recent book is Love in Print in the Sixteenth Century: The Popularization of Romance (Palgrave, 2014). L i z O a k l e y- B r ow n teaches English literature at Lancaster University. She is the author of Ovid and the Cultural Politics of Translation in Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2006) and of numerous book chapters and journal articles on early modern literature. Kyle Pivetti is associate professor of English at Norwich University, the author of Memory and Literary Form: Making the Early Modern English Nation (Delaware University Press, 2015), and co-editor, with John Garrison, of Sexuality and Memory in Early Modern England: Literature and the Erotics of Recollection (Routledge, 2015). M e l i s sa E . S a n c h e z is Donald T. Regan Professor of English and comparative literature and core faculty in gender, sexuality, and

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Contributors 305

women’s studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of three books: Erotic Subjects: The Sexuality of Politics in Early Modern English Literature (Oxford University Press, 2011), Shakespeare and Queer Theory (Bloomsbury Arden, 2019), and Queer Faith: Reading Promiscuity and Race in Sexual Love Tradition (New York University Press, 2019). She has also co-edited three volumes of essays: Spenser and “the Human,” a special volume of Spenser Studies (2016); Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies: Gender, Race, Sexuality (2016); and Desiring History and Historicizing Desire, a special issue of the Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies (2016). E r i c B . S o n g is associate professor of English at Swarthmore College and the author of Dominion Undeserved: Milton and the Perils of Creation (Cornell University Press, 2013). He is currently at  work on a book tentatively titled Love against Substitution: The Politics of Theology of Conjugal Narratives in SeventeenthCentury England. G or a n Sta ni v ukov i c is professor of early Modern English literature and culture at Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is the author of Knights in Arms: Prose Romance, Masculinity, and Eastern Mediterranean Trade in Early Modern England, 1565–1655 (University of Toronto Press, 2016) and co-author, with John Cameron, of Tragedies of the English Renaissance (Edinburgh University Press, 2018). Most recently, he has edited Timely Voices: Romance Writing in English Literature (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017) and Queer Shakespeare: Desire and Sexuality (Bloomsbury, 2017). M.L. Sta p l e ton is Chapman Distinguished Professor of English at Purdue University. He is the author of Harmful Eloquence: Ovid’s “Amores” from Antiquity to Shakespeare (Michigan University Press, 1996), Spenser’s Ovidian Poetics (University of Delaware Press, 2000), Marlowe’s Ovid: “The Elegies” in the Marlowe Canon (Ashgate, 2014), and Thomas Heywood’s “Art of Love”: The First Complete English Translation of Ovid’s “Ars Amatoria” (University of Michigan Press, 2000). L i sa S . S ta r k s is professor of English at University of South Florida, the author of Transforming Ovid: Violence, Trauma, and Virtus in Shakespeare’s Roman Poems and Plays (Palgrave, 2014), and the editor of Ovid and Adaptation in Early Modern English

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Theatre (Edinburgh University Press, 2019). She has published journal articles in Shakespeare Quarterly, Early Modern Literary Studies, Theatre Journal, and Literature and Psychology.

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Index

abjection, 49, 54–5 Actaeon. See Ovid Adam and Eve, 13, 63, 111, 246–8, 257, 260–3 Adelman, Janet, 16n11 aggression, 5 Alexander, Nigel, 229 Althusser, Louis, 298 Ansley, John, 43n29 Apollo and Hyacinthus. See Ovid Arachne. See Ovid Asiatic otherness, 161 Atalanta. See Ovid autoeroticism, 171 Ayers, Harry Morgan, 117 Bacchus. See Ovid Bacon, Francis, 72, 179–80 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 224 Barkan, Leonard, 52, 290–1 Barthes, Roland, 186–7 Bate, Jonathan, 4, 39, 60, 145n17 Bates, Catherine, 72, 272 Battus. See Ovid Beaumont, Francis: Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, 100, 226, 232, 234–6, 238

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Berek, Peter, 279 Berlant, Lauren, 70–1 Bevington, David, 188 Biberman, Matthew, 275, 278–9 Blank, Paula, 159 body, 3–4, 8–11, 25, 30, 38, 40, 53, 56–7, 59, 72, 75–6, 79, 91, 95, 100, 119–20, 132–3, 135–7, 139, 141–2, 167, 169, 184, 186, 188, 192–3, 207, 210, 217–18, 235, 237–8, 250, 273–5, 288–9, 291– 4; Asian, 160; female, 275; holy, 281; Jewish, 275–6; male, 6–7, 32, 39, 152, 158, 169, 180, 274– 6, 278, 284n31; middle-class, 160; virile, 23; upper-class, 160 Boehrer, Bruce, 197n7 Boswell, John, 270 Bourdieu, Pierre, 8 Boyarin, Daniel, 279 boys, 26, 30–1, 137–8, 141, 235, 275, 289 Braden, Gordon, 52 Bredbeck, Gregory, 229 Breitenberg, Mark, 23n18 Brinsley, John, 24, 145n17 Brown, Georgia, 295

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308 Index

Cahoon, Leslie, 93, 96 Cain, Tom, 181, 186, 188–91, 201n79 Calliope, 93–6, 100, 103 Campana, Joseph, 80 Carr, Joan, 197n10 Carter, Sarah, 79, 278 castration, 275 Caxton, William, 202, 204 Cephalus and Procris. See Ovid di Cesare, Mario, 125 Chapman, George, 6 Chess, Simone, 80 Cicero, 31, 204 Cinyras and Myrrha. See Ovid circumcision, 275 Clement, Francis, 27, 30 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, 174n19 Colbert, Stephen, 296 Colet, John, 212–13 Conti, Natale, 12, 86–92, 96, 101–3; about Clytemnestra in the Odyssey, 104n8 cross-dressing, 134–5, 141, 269–70, 272 Culler, Jonathan, 82n8 Cyane. See Ovid Cygnus, 54 Cynaras. See Ovid

Das, Nandini, 137 Dekker, Thomas, 185 Dentith, Simon, 224–5 Derrida, Jacques, 247, 291 desire, 5, 10–13, 17n20, 34, 37, 49, 52, 71–6, 78–80, 88, 99–101, 104, 112–13, 130–1, 133, 136–8, 140–4, 149, 153, 155–6, 158–9, 165–6, 168–9, 188, 190, 226, 229, 231, 233, 235–8, 254, 272– 3, 278–9; amorous, 131, 146n27; cross-sex, 168; erotic, 131, 246, 255; female, 160, 175n30, 213, 295; heteroerotic, 153; heteronormative, 189; homoerotic, 116, 121, 143, 149–50n69, 168, 236; lesbian, 154; male, 33, 129, 132; masculine, 112; polymorphous, 33; queer, 112, 130; same-sex, 168; sexual, 5–6, 19, 102, 113, 133, 135, 137, 144, 154, 226, 233, 236–7, 269; transgressive, 139; violent, 96, 180 Diana. See Ovid dialogue, 10 DiGangi, Mario, 43n30, 46n59, 165 dismemberment, 28, 137 Donaldson, Ian, 181 Donne, John, 9, 151, 159–61, 164, 166, 170; and “Sappho and Philaenis”, 13, 152–3, 159, 163– 5, 168–71 Douglas, Mary, 50 Drayton, Michael, 236 Drinkwater, Megan O., 297, 302n24

Daedalus and Icarus. See Ovid Dalechamp, Caleb, 251–2, 254–5 Daphne. See Ovid

Echo. See Ovid education, 8, 24–5, 39, 138, 146n27, 196, 209, 229–31, 233

Brown, Sarah Annes, 76 Brown, Steven, 86 Burke, Kenneth, 60–1 Burrow, Colin, 7, 18n23, 130, 139, 147n43, 183 Butler, Judith, 288

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Index 309

Edwards, John, 248, 251 Edward’s Boys, 189 effeminacy, 12, 25, 32–3, 113, 228, 269 Eisendrath, Rachel, 148n46 Ekphrasis, 136–7 elegy, 10, 35–7, 46n51, 46n52, 46n57, 46n59, 58, 110, 139, 153, 155, 157, 159, 169–70 Ellis, Jim, 226, 229, 231, 233, 235, 237 eloquence, 12, 23–4, 26–31, 37, 39–40, 43n29, 110, 116, 118, 131, 146n27, 154, 157, 215 emasculation, 275 embodiment, 11–12, 14, 18n23, 69, 111, 113–14, 132, 135, 140–1, 143, 154, 191, 229, 269, 282 enargeia, 57 energeia, 57 endogamy, 55 Endymion. See Ovid Enterline, Lynn, 40n5, 41n6, 41–2n13, 50–1, 50n67, 53, 55, 70, 104n7, 211, 217, 293 envy, 13 epic, 4, 6, 11–12, 32, 35–6, 49, 55, 58, 62n11, 68, 82n8, 87, 89, 101, 130, 142, 147n43, 245–8, 251, 254–5, 258–9, 261–2, 265n22, 266n29, 289–90, 293, 295, 298 epistle, 10, 13, 29, 69, 72, 151, 153, 249 epyllion, 6, 9, 11–12, 14, 16n12, 19, 67n50, 82n8, 139, 185, 223, 226–31, 237–8, 281, 295 Erasmus, Desiderius [of Rotterdam], 32, 73, 83n16, 202– 3, 205, 209, 212, 214, 216, 219, 220n5

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Erickson, Peter, 172n2 erotic counsel, 205 eroticism, 3–4, 6, 9, 14, 43n31, 131, 134–5, 140, 223, 227 Erskine-Hill, Howard, 186 Eurydice, 26, 28, 33–4 Everett, Clare, 84n18 femininity, 17n20, 32, 51, 76, 78–9, 161, 168, 175n30, 235–6, 280, 295; male, 153 Fowler, Don, 104n4 Fox, Cora, 272 Foyster, Elizabeth A., 6 Freccero, Carla, 47n66 Freud, Sigmund, 74, 84n25, 275 friendship, 5, 138 Gallagher, Lowell, 264n12 Ganymede. See Ovid Gascoigne, George, 12 gender, 8–9, 11, 19n30, 24, 31–3, 41n6, 44n35, 48, 53, 60, 62n2, 86, 89, 96, 100–1, 109, 121, 127n42, 130, 134, 140, 149n66, 152, 154, 161, 166, 168–9, 172n2, 173n12, 175n29, 192, 207, 214, 225–7, 270, 278, 282n3, 294–5, 294, 298; binaries, 10, 51–2, 59, 80, 99, 135; boundary, 269; dynamics, 79, 100; female, 142; fluidity, 267–8; hierarchy, 160, 246; identities, 51, 57, 102, 109, 269, 272, 274; masculine, 117, 132, 274; norms, 59, 104n6, 151, 170, 268, 274, 280; one-sex model, 16n9; parity, 261; politics, 192; relations, 257; reversal, 139; roles, 14, 75, 223, 237, 297; shape-shifting,

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310 Index 282n30; stereotype, 297; third, 135 genre, 6, 11, 32, 36, 46, 49, 60, 82n8, 89, 109, 125n17, 130, 132, 188, 192, 223–4, 226, 232, 237–8, 265n22, 293 Glaucus. See Ovid Golding, Arthur, 29, 33, 45n50, 64n25, 69, 191–2, 228, 271, 283n18, 289 Gordon, Pamela, 160 Gosson, Stephen, 25 Greenblatt, Stephen, 149n66, 278 Greene, Robert, 129, 131, 133, 145n13 Greene, Thomas M., 120, 226n24, 267n29 Guy-Bray, Stephen, 43n31, 47n68, 139 Halberstam, Jack, 152–3, 160–1, 165 Halet, Judith P., 160 Hall, Kim F., 162, 172n2 Halperin, David M., 166 Halpern, Richard, 212 Hamilton, A.C., 92, 99 Hardie, Philip, 87, 266n23 Hardison, O.B., 46n51 Harris, Jonathan Gil, 272 Harvey, Karen, 207 Heng, Geraldine, 172n2 hermaphrodite, 12, 99, 100–1, 235, 87–8, 111, 235 Hermaphroditus. See Ovid Hero and Leander. See Ovid heteromasculinity, 152 heterosexuality, 170, 280 Heywood, Thomas, 267, 269 homoeroticism, 113, 139

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homosexuality, 55, 154, 137, 148n44, 170 homosocial: bonding, 138; cultural structures, 238; environment, 235; maturation, 223; writing, 182 Horace, 26, 29, 185 hospitality, 10, 246–8, 250–7, 260–3 humanism, 206, 211, 246 Hutcheon, Linda, 225 Hutson, Lorna, 32, 83n17, 84n17, 131 Icarus. See Ovid imitation, 5, 24, 131–2, 144n6, 159, 185, 217, 223–5, 238, 288, 299 incest, 48, 51, 55, 183, 294 influence, 3, 19, 28, 30, 40, 43n29, 43n31, 60, 70, 73, 78, 87, 91–2, 96–7, 102–3, 130–1, 144, 147n43, 159, 207, 225, 238, 246, 263–4n5, 288–9 Ingleheart, Jennifer, 148n44 interiority, 3, 5, 15n1 intersex male body, 274–5 intertextuality, 14, 223–6, 238–9n1, 239n16 Jacobson, Miriam, 19n30 James, Heather, 45n46, 199n33 Johnson, Barbara, 152 Johnson, Patricia, 92, 106n27 Johnson, Richard, 133, 138–9 Jonson, Ben, 27, 180, 182, 184–5, 193, 196n4, 197n14, 224; Poetaster, 13, 180–8, 190–3 Jove [Jupiter]. See Ovid. Karras, Ruth, 208 Keach, William, 78, 226–7, 236

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Index 311

Keith, Alison, 89, 101 Kilgour, Maggie, 145n9, 149n68, 265–6n22 King James I, 5 Kristeva, Julia, 49–51, 224 Leach, Eleanor Winsor, 290 lesbianism, 153, 161, 165, 170 Lively, Genevieve, 95 Lodge, Thomas, 129–40, 142–3, 229, 235; “Scillaes Metamorphosis”, 228–30, 235 Lord, Louis E., 117 love, 3, 5–7, 9, 12, 19, 26, 28, 33–7, 46n51, 46n57, 56–7, 61, 64, 64–5n28, 68, 70–6, 78, 81, 82n9, 84n25, 85n38, 99, 109– 13, 116–18, 121, 128n56, 129– 44, 149n68, 152, 157–8, 160, 163, 165–6, 168, 170–1, 175n29, 175n30, 183–4, 197n10, 204–5, 212, 216–17, 219, 229, 231–2, 235–7, 245–6, 248, 261–3, 263n3, 268–9, 281–2, 287, 299; homoerotic, 139; lesbian, 169 Luborsky, Ruth Samson, 184n30 Lucrece. See Ovid Lucretius, 75–6 lyric, 35, 54, 58, 82n8, 156, 272, 281, 292 MacFaul, Tom, 80–1 manhood, 6–10, 12, 14, 79–80, 97–8, 117, 142, 152, 169, 179, 183–4, 207, 209, 215, 223, 245– 6, 259–61, 269, 272, 275, 290 Mann, Jenny C., 131 Marlowe, Christopher, 7, 12, 14, 35–7, 56, 225–6, 237, 267–9, 273–4, 276, 278–9; Edward II,

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272, 279; Hero and Leander, 281; The Jew of Malta, 14, 267, 272–3, 279; Tamburlaine, 279 Mars. See Ovid Marshall, Cynthia, 148n45 Marsyas. See Ovid Martelli, Mario, 128n56 Martindale, Charles, 247, 257 masculine: agency, 289; virtue, 24 masculinity, 3–8, 10, 13–14, 17n20, 18n23, 19n30, 27, 30, 35, 39, 40n5, 41–2n13, 43n28, 44n39, 51, 68–70, 72–3, 76, 78–81, 83n11, 84n23, 89, 92, 96–8, 102–3, 116, 130, 139–44, 146n27, 151–4, 160–1, 166, 168, 170–1, 174n19, 175n30, 176n33, 179, 183, 188, 191, 193, 206–7, 212, 223, 226, 228, 232, 235, 237–8, 245–6, 261, 267, 269–70, 272–3, 275, 277–82, 282n3, 287–9, 292, 295–6, 298; chivalric, 135; fluid, 6, 268; heroic, 131, 138; Jewish, 268; martial, 12; Ovidian, 11, 131–3, 135–8, 298; Roman ideal of, 31, 33, 281; soft, 9, 25, 32–3 Masten, Jeffrey, 44n35 McAdam, Ian, 278, 285n41, 285n42 McNulty, Tracy, 250 Menon, Madhavi, 75 Mercury. See Ovid Merula, Bartolomeo, 202, 214, 220n3 Milton, John, 7, 10, 12, 109–10, 113–14, 245–7, 256–7, 259–63; “Lycidas”, 110; Paradise Lost, 110–11, 245–6, 248, 256, 258– 62; Paradise Regained, 261–2 Minerva. See Ovid

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312 Index Moore, Helen, 130, 132 Moul, Victoria, 189 Moulton, Ian Frederick, 32, 69 Mulryan, John, 86 Munro, Lucy, 190 muteness, 157, 160 Myrrha. See Ovid narcissism, 55 Nashe, Thomas, 205–6 Newman, Jane, 157–8 Niccoli, Ottavia, 276 Orpheus. See Ovid Ovid, 3–15, 15n1, 17n20, 18n23, 19n30, 24–5, 29–30, 33–40, 41n8, 43n32, 45n46, 45n47, 46n52, 48–53, 55, 58–62, 63n22, 69–70, 74, 76, 81, 83n10, 92–3, 95, 100, 102–3, 105n16, 106n27, 115–16, 118, 124, 129–35, 137, 139–44, 145n17, 146n27, 147n43, 151, 153, 155, 159–62, 166, 170, 173n13, 175n30, 179– 89, 192–3, 197n10, 197n15, 199n33, 202–5, 208–9, 211–12, 214–15, 219–21, 223, 226, 229– 30, 246, 252, 254–5, 257, 259, 266n23, 266n24, 268–72, 277– 8, 280–1, 285n40, 288, 290, 293–8, 302n24; Actaeon, 54, 59, 64n28, 136–7, 272; Amores, 7, 13, 35–7, 46, 58, 129, 133, 139, 151, 160, 173n13, 186, 188, 199, 204, 281, 289, 291; Apollo and Hyacinthus, 13, 28, 35, 39, 52–4, 56–8, 64n28, 66n41, 66n43, 112–13, 118, 152, 292, 296; Arachne, 48–50, 290; Ars amatoria [Art of Love], 13,

31862_Garrison.indd 312

43n29, 70, 129–30, 133, 141, 151, 180, 182–3, 202, 204, 206, 209–11, 218–19, 220n1, 269, 292, 296, 300; Atalanta, 28, 112; Bacchus, 53, 56, 64, 110, 115– 16; Battus, 54, 64n28, 255; Cephalus, 167, 229, 292; Cyane, 94–6; Cygnus, 54, 64n28; Cynaras, 28; Daedalus, 53, 290, 296–7; Daphne, 54, 57, 63n24, 113, 152; Diana, 59, 64n28, 101, 137, 234, 237, 272; Echo, 54, 64n28, 292–4; Endymion [Endimion], 236, 240n19, 241n33, 167; Ex ponto, 24, 204; Fasti, 180, 204; Ganymede, 28, 35, 53, 112, 115, 118, 121, 125n16, 126n23, 127n38, 140–3, 149n69, 167, 171; Glaucus, 229–31, 235, 237, 239; Hermaphroditus, 100–3, 226–8, 232, 234–6, 238, 256, 295; Hero and Leander, 136–7, 226, 228, 232–3, 236–8; Heroides, 13, 130–1, 133–4, 137, 151, 153–5, 158–62, 166, 173n13, 240n20, 290–1, 302n24; Icarus, 53, 296– 7; Jove [Jupiter], 34–5, 53, 80, 96, 112, 118, 142–3, 149, 167, 248, 252–4, 260; Lucrece, 295; Mars, 12, 68–76, 78–1, 141, 167; Marsyas, 57, 64, 290; Mercury, 57, 64, 64n28, 100, 115, 183, 248, 252–3, 255–6, 266n24, 266n29; Metamorphoses, 3, 6, 12–13, 24, 28–9, 35, 38–9, 43n31, 48–55, 57–61, 64, 68–9, 74, 81, 87, 92, 95, 100–2, 109, 111–13, 117–18, 130, 133, 135, 137, 139, 143, 146–7n27, 151–2,

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Index 313

180, 182, 185, 191, 204, 228, 232, 252, 254–5, 265, 266n24, 270–1, 283, 287, 289–91, 293–4, 296; Minerva, 48–9, 92–3; Myrrha, 28, 112; Orpheus, 12, 26–31, 33–40, 43n40, 45n48, 46n52, 47n66, 47n68, 53, 56–7, 64n24, 109–20, 137–9, 148n44, 290; Pan, 53, 57, 59, 63n24; Paris and Oenone, 232, 295; Perseus and Andromeda, 162–3; Philemon and Baucis, 14, 246– 56, 259–63, 263n5; Procris, 229, 292; Proserpina, 33, 93–5, 115; Proteus, 14, 39, 267–73, 275–81; Pygmalion and Galatea, 28, 46n60, 112, 267; Remedia ­amoris, 133, 143, 180, 204, 219; Salmacis, 100–2, 226, 228, 230, 233, 235–6, 240–1, 255, 295; Sappho, 13, 151–9, 160–71, 172n5, 173n9, 174n21, 175n29; Tarquin, 295; Tristia, 102, 180, 182, 188, 200n56, 204–5; Venus and Adonis, 28, 68, 70, 104n7, 112, 139, 229, 295; Vulcan, 69, 78 pacifism, 68–9, 72, 84n23 Palmerin of England, 133, 136 Pan. See Ovid Paris and Oenone. See Ovid Parker, Patricia, 32, 43n35 parody, 223–5, 230 patriarchy, 226, 258 Pavey, Solomon, 190 Pavlock, Barbara, 102, 105n16 Peacham, Henry, 42n21, 29 Peele, George, 228 Peend, Thomas, 228–30

31862_Garrison.indd 313

Perseus and Andromeda. See Ovid perversity, 55, 73, 252, 295 Petrarch [Francesco Petrarca], 54, 57–61, 113, 272 Philemon and Baucis. See Ovid Plato, 27, 86, 113, 291 Poliziano, Angelo, 113–15, 120–3 Poole, Joshua, 30 Proserpina. See Ovid Proteus. See Ovid Prynne, William, 269–70 puberty, 289 Putnam, Michael, C.J., 15n1 Puttenham, George, 28 Pygmalion and Galatea. See Ovid queer, 34, 43, 70, 82n9, 113, 116, 119, 123, 139, 143, 176n33, 264n12, 268, 272; female-female desire, 10; male Jew, 270, 273; masculinity, 9; representation, 143; sexuality, 109; singularity, 11 queerness, 10 Quintilian, 31–2, 38 Rambuss, Richard, 78, 171 Rebhorn, Wayne, 30–1 reception, 6, 9, 14, 70, 130, 137, 184, 204, 223, 296 Reeser, Todd W., 84n23 representation, 3, 5, 8, 10, 19n30, 52, 80, 83n17, 130–1, 144, 183, 186, 268 rhetoric, 11, 23, 26, 30–2, 40n3, 43n28, 56–7, 70, 132, 134, 138, 140, 140n27, 220n5, 233–5, 269, 295 Rich, Barnaby, 72 Rimell, Victoria, 17n20

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314 Index Rocke, Michael, 120 romance, 4, 10–13, 58–9, 66n46, 69, 78, 129–33, 135–44, 147n43, 149n69 Rome, 31, 102, 180, 182, 184–5, 252, 254, 269, 298, 302n24 Rose, Margaret A., 224 Ross, Alexander, 270 Salmacis. See Ovid same-sex bonds, 11 Sanchez, Melissa E., 13, 72 Sandys, George, 29, 37, 43n31, 45n50, 182–3, 247 Sappho. See Ovid Saslow, James, 125, 126n23, 127n38, 149n69 Saunders, Ben, 160 school, 24, 30, 202, 206, 211, 289, 295 schoolboys, 7, 13 Scott, William, 9 seduction, 13, 60, 134, 139, 208, 211, 215, 233 Seneca, 32 sex-change, 48 sexual identity, 51, 172n2 sexuality, 9–11, 14, 46n59, 76, 85n38, 97, 119, 128n57, 129, 132, 134, 143, 149n68, 149n69, 154, 166, 170, 172n2, 197n14, 223, 226, 268, 270, 278. See also queer sexual orientation, 53 Shakespeare, William, 3–4, 11–12, 16n11, 18n30, 39, 60–1, 68–72, 75, 79–80, 132, 139–40, 180, 185, 193, 226–7, 288, 291, 293; A Midsummer Night’s Dream,

31862_Garrison.indd 314

7–8; Antony and Cleopatra, 3, 79; As You Like It, 140, 179; Coriolanus, 76, 79; Hamlet [character], 79–80; Henry V, 79; Julius Caesar, 180, 183–4, 254; Romeo and Juliet, 189, 200n56; Sonnets, 80, 300; Troilus and Cressida, 78; Venus and Adonis, 12, 19n30, 67n50, 68, 70–1, 73, 76, 80, 82n8, 104n7, 139, 227, 231 Shapiro, James, 273, 275 Sharrock, Alison, 101 Shepard, Alexandra, 207 Sidney, Philip, 12, 23, 25–6, 40, 41n8, 56, 58, 72, 129; Defense of Poesy, 25, 56; New Arcadia, 59 Silberman, Lauren, 99, 101 Simons, Patricia, 6, 17n16 skin colour, 161 Smith, Bruce R., 70, 78, 132, 179, 188–9, 236, 270 Smith, Ian, 40n3 sodomite, 79, 122, 270, 278, 285n41 Spear, Gary, 32 Spenser, Edmund, 12, 58, 72, 80, 86–7, 90–1, 96; The Faerie Queene, 3, 87, 90–2, 96–9, 102–3 Stanivukovic, Goran V., 82n9 Stapleton, M.L., 70, 185–6, 272, 277–8 Starks-Estes, Lisa, 79 Steggle, Matthew, 200n64 Stewart, Alan, 120, 125n18 Still, Judith, 265n17 Stubbes, Philip, 269 Stubbes, William, 25

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Index 315

Tarquin. See Ovid Thibault, John C., 182 Thomas, Keith, 211 Trachtenberg, Joshua, 274 translation, 5, 9–10, 12–13, 24, 29, 35–7, 39, 43n29, 43n31, 45n50, 55, 58, 61, 62n1, 63n11, 64n25, 69, 116–17, 126n23, 135, 156, 162, 166, 173n13, 182, 184, 191, 202–4, 217–19, 220n1, 228, 240n20, 240n24, 271, 283n15. transvestism, 84n18, 140, 143, 270 Traub, Valerie, 132, 165, 169, 172n2, 175n30, 193 tribade, 153, 165–6, 170, 175n31 Tribble, Evelyn, 188, 190 Turberville, George, 154n13, 156– 7, 163, 240n20 Van den Berg, Sara, 187 Van Es, Bart, 188–9 Vaught, Jennifer C., 279 Venus and Adonis. See Ovid Vickers, Brian, 41n11 Vickers, Nancy, 59 Virgil, 3–4, 15n1, 15n3, 35, 71, 81, 90, 111, 115–16, 130, 142, 145n9,

31862_Garrison.indd 315

180, 185, 188, 204, 245, 251–2, 255, 265n22, 266n24, 271, 289– 90; Aeneid, 3, 35, 49, 185, 245, 251, 258, 289–90, 298; Eclogues, 81; Georgics, 28, 111, 298 virtus, 11, 32, 41n11, 89, 161, 171, 245 Vives, Juan Luis, 184, 221n5 Voekel, Swen, 247 voice, 5, 9, 13, 15, 28, 52–5, 59, 74, 95–6, 133–4, 146n27, 151–2, 154, 160, 215, 279, 289, 291–3 Vulcan. See Ovid Warner, Michael, 70 Wheeler, Arthur L., 197n15 Williams, Raymond, 81 Wilson, Thomas, 28 de Worde, Wynkyn, 13, 202–4, 206, 208 Wordelman, Amy L., 256 Young, Elizabeth Marie, 35, 40, 45n48, 46n52, 46n57 Zeitlin, Froma I., 150n71 Zuckerburg, Donna, 296

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31862_Garrison.indd 316

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