Introduction
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Notes Introduction 1. Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), 243. 2. Gordon Braden, ‘Ovid and Shakespeare’, in A Companion to Ovid, ed. Peter E. Knox (Hoboken: John Wiley and Sons, 2009), 640–1. 3. All citations from Ovid in Latin taken from The Complete Works of Ovid (Delphi Classics: Kindle ebook edition, 2012). 4. All citations of Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses are to Ovid’s Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation 1567, ed. John Frederick Nims (1965; Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2000). 5. All citations of Metamorphoses in contemporary English translation are to Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Charles Martin (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2004). 6. Sarah Annes Brown, ‘Philomela’, Translation and Literature 13 (2004): 194–206, 196. 7. Lynn Enterline discusses the relevance of this term in the line between what cannot be and what is spoken in her analysis of Philomela’s tongue as an emblem of the violated body’s voice (The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare [Cambridge University Press, 2000], 3). She quotes Elissa Marder, who has noted that here Ovid ‘insists on the convergence between speaking the crime and doing the deed. One cannot speak “rape”, or speak about rape, merely in terms of a physical body. The sexual violation of the woman’s body is itself embedded in discursive and symbolic structures’ (‘Disarticulated Voices: Feminism and Philomela’, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 7.2 [Spring 1992]: 148–66, 158). 8. I strongly agree with Patrick Cheney’s argument that Shakespeare employs Virgil and other writers while in the end aligning himself with Marlowe as mostly an Ovidian poet-playwright, although I see Shakespeare as more vehemently Ovidian, more like Marlowe in this respect, than he does. I also agree strongly with Cheney’s main claim that Shakespeare should be seen as a ‘poet-playwright’, not exclusively a dramatist. See Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright (Cambridge University Press, 2004), esp. 13–79. 9. See Don Cameron Allen, Mysteriously Meant: The Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical Interpretation in the Renaissance (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), esp. 163–99. 10. For more on this matter, see Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), esp. 25. 11. Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid, 31. 12. Georgia Brown, Redefining Elizabethan Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 42. 13. See A.B. Taylor, Introduction to Shakespeare’s Ovid: The Metamorphoses in the Plays and Poems, ed. A.B. Taylor (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1–2; and Colin Burrow, ‘Shakespeare and Humanistic Culture’, in Shakespeare and the 184 Notes to Introduction 185 Classics, ed. Charles Martindale and A.B. Taylor (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 13. 14. Burrow, ‘Shakespeare and Humanistic Culture’, 13. 15. See Burrow, ‘Shakespeare and Humanistic Culture’, 9–27. 16. Taylor, Shakespeare’s Ovid, 1; and Burrow, ‘Shakespeare and Humanistic Culture’, 9–17. 17. Stephen Gosson, The Schoole of Abuse, Conteining a pleasaunt invective against Poets, Pipers, Plaiers, Jesters, and such like Caterpillers of a Commonwealth (1570), ed. Edward Arber (London, 1906), 20. Quoted in Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid, 24. 18. See Raphael Lyne, ‘Ovid in English Translation’, in The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, ed. Philip Hardie (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 249. 19. See Taylor, Shakespeare’s Ovid, 2; and Raphael Lyne, Ovid’s Changing Worlds: English Metamorphoses, 1567–1632 (Oxford University Press, 2001). 20. Liz Oakley-Brown, Ovid and the Cultural Politics of Translation in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 1–15. 21. Oakley-Brown, Ovid and the Cultural Politics, 11. 22. On Golding’s commentary as paratext, see Raphael Lyne, ‘The Paratext of Golding’s Ovid’, in English Literature and Transformation, ed. Sabine Coelsch- Foisnel (Tυ¨bingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 1999), 57–69. For an opposing view, see Madeline Forey, ‘“Bless thee, Bottom, bless thee! Thou Art Translated!” Ovid, Golding, and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”’, The Modern Language Review 93 (1998): 321–9, esp. 325. 23. Lyne, ‘The Paratext of Golding’s Ovid’, 66. 24. Cora Fox, Ovid and the Politics of Emotion in Elizabethan England (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 22–3. In Fox’s reading of the section of the Epistle, she sees Golding warning the reader of excess emotion. Although I agree, it is important to note – and it is implied in Plato’s Allegory – that it is particular kinds of passions that pose a threat – those that lead to ‘sin’, to transgressive desires, and often result in profound suffering or trauma. 25. For a discussion of these points in the Preface, see Lyne, ‘The Paratext of Golding’s Ovid’, 61. 26. Lyne notes that Golding’s translation shows a certain amount of pull from contrary desires to faithfully translate the poem and to increase its ‘moral content’. Even so, Golding rarely employs a ‘genuinely moralizing tone’ in his translation (Ovid’s Changing Worlds, 30). 27. On the significance of Golding publishing the poem as a whole, see Lyne, Ovid’s Changing Worlds, 28. 28. See Taylor, Shakespeare’s Ovid, 1–5; ‘Golding’s Ovid, Shakespeare’s “Small Latin”, and the Real Object of Mockery in “Pyramus and Thisbe”’, Shakespeare Survey 42 (1989): 53–64, 54–5; Lyne, Ovid’s Changing Worlds, esp. 23–78; and Braden, ‘Ovid and Shakespeare’, 640–844, 642. Braden also emphasizes Golding’s significance in increasing awareness and influence of the classics in the English Renaissance, in The Classics and English Renaissance Poetry: Three Case Studies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 1. 29. See Taylor, ‘Golding’s Ovid’, 56. 30. See Taylor, Shakespeare’s Ovid, 3. Notably, Lyne sees Golding’s use of the four- teener as effective for his readers, as it ‘[m]akes Ovid more local, regional, and even rural’ (Ovid’s Changing Worlds, 75). 186 Notes to Introduction 31. See Lyne, Ovid’s Changing Worlds, 29. 32. For a full discussion on Golding’s ‘Englishing’, see Lyne, Ovid’s Changing Worlds, esp. 54–78. On Golding’s modernization of Ovid’s deities and Middle English traditions, see Charles and Michelle Martindale, Shakespeare and the Uses of Antiquity: An Introductory Essay (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 72–3. 33. Taylor, Shakespeare’s Ovid, 5. 34. Bate notes that, during this time, ‘ways of reading Ovid underwent radical transformation’ (Shakespeare and Ovid, 25); and Lee T. Pearcy also comments that, ‘new developments in style and new ways of reading the ancient authors had made it possible to translate a new Ovid’ (The Mediated Muse: English Translations of Ovid, 1560–1700 [Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1984], 1. For more on this new Ovidianism, see William Keach, Elizabethan Erotic Narratives: Irony and Pathos in the Ovidian Poetry of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Their Contemporaries (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1977), 31–5, esp. 4; and Laurence Lerner, ‘Ovid and the Elizabethans’, in Ovid Renewed: Ovidian Influences on Literature and Art from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century, ed. Charles Martindale (Cambridge University Press, 1988), 121–35. 35. Keach, Elizabethan Erotic Narratives, 29. 36. Colin Burrow, ‘Re-embodying Ovid: Renaissance Afterlives’, in The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, ed. Philip Hardie (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 301–19, 304. 37. Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid, 32. 38. Bate has shown that Shakespeare did read primary texts in Latin (and French), along with English translations of them (Shakespeare and Ovid, 7–8). Although scholars have argued about the degree to which Shakespeare read Ovid in Latin and translation, they agree that evidence points to his use of them in combination. See also Martindale and Martindale, Shakespeare and the Uses of Antiquity, 74–6; and Taylor, Shakespeare’s Ovid, 2. 39. See Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid, 31 and Keach, Elizabethan Erotic Narratives, 29. For more on the role of the Amores and Marlowe’s career, see Patrick Cheney, Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession: Ovid, Spenser, Counter-Nationhood (University of Toronto Press, 1997). 40. Keach, Elizabethan Erotic Narratives, 35. 41. Georgia Brown points out this ambivalence. Although Ovid provided writ- ers with classical weight, his erotic poetry was scandalous, thereby making it shameful – albeit desirable – to imitate him. See Redefining Elizabethan Literature, 2–44, esp. 39–40. 42. Numerous critics have made this point. According to Charles Martindale, ‘Ovid is no moraliser but his sympathetic interest in so many aspects of the human predicament has its own moral dimension’ (Introduction to Ovid Renewed: Ovidian Influences on Literature and Art from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century, ed. Charles Martindale [Cambridge University Press, 1988], 9); and both Charles Paul Segal and Goran V. Stanivukovic describe his Metamorphoses as ‘moral’ but not ‘moralistic’. See Segal, Landscape in Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’: A Study in the Transformations of a Literary Symbol (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag GMBH, 1969), 2–3; Stanivukovic, Introduction to Ovid and the Renaissance Body, ed. Goran V. Stanivukovic (University of Toronto Press, 2001), 5. Notes to Introduction 187 43. Keach, Elizabethan Erotic Narratives, 4–5. 44. Burrow, ‘Re-embodying Ovid: Renaissance Afterlives’, 302. 45. See Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid, 84–7; also, on translatio and imitatio, 131. 46. See Agnès Lafont, Introduction to Shakespeare’s Erotic Mythology and Ovidian Renaissance Culture, ed. Agnès Lafont (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 2. 47. Dennis J. Siler, The Influence of the Roman Poet Ovid on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Intertextual Parallels and Meta-Ovidian Tendencies (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2010), 10–12. 48. Paul Barolsky makes a similar point, that ‘the transformation of one story into another, the metamorphosis of one fable into another is as central to Ovid’s Metamorphoses as it is to Renaissance Ovidian art’ (‘As in Ovid, so in Renaissance Art’, Renaissance Quarterly 51 [1998]: 451–74, 466), quoted in Lafont, Introduction to Shakespeare’s Erotic Mythology, 5.