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Renaissance Tales of Desire

Renaissance Tales of Desire: and , and , Ceyx and Alcione and his Journey to Hell. A Revised and Augmented Edition

Edited by

Sophie Chiari

Renaissance Tales of Desire: Hermaphroditus and Salmacis, Theseus and Ariadne, Ceyx and Alcione and Orpheus his Journey to Hell . A Revised and Augmented Edition, Edited by Sophie Chiari

This book first published 2012

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2012 by Sophie Chiari and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-3668-0, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-3668-5

In memory of my father.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ...... ix

Preface by Sarah Annes Brown ...... xi

General Introduction...... 1

Part I: Hermaphroditus and Salmacis

Introduction to The Pleasant Fable of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis ...... 21

The Pleasant Fable of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis ...... 47 Thomas Peend

Part II: Theseus and Ariadne

An Introduction to The Excellent Historye of Theseus and Ariadne ...... 87

The Excellent Historye of Theseus and Ariadne...... 115 Thomas Underdowne

Part III: Ceyx and Alcione

An Introduction to Ceyx Kynge of Thracine and Alcione his Wife ...... 145

The Tragicall and lamentable Histoire of two faithfull mates...... 173 William Hubbard

Part IV: Orpheus his Journey to Hell

An Introduction to Orpheus his Journey to Hell ...... 191

Orpheus his Journey to Hell...... 223 R. B.

Bibliography...... 253

Index...... 267

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This edition is a revised, amended version of my Renaissance Tales of Desire first published in 2009, with an augmented, updated General Introduction and the addition of a fourth tale, Orpheus his Journey to Hell , only signed by the two initials R. B.

The critical sources I have used are all duly acknowledged in the bibliography at the end of the volume.

I am grateful to a number of friends and colleagues for their encouragements. My special thanks go to Pierre Iselin for his helpful comments, to Nicolas Buté for the generous gift of his books and other useful material on the Renaissance epyllion, and to Dominique Goy- Blanquet, the President of the French Shakespeare Society, for her generous support and bibliographical suggestions.

My greatest debt, though, is to Sarah Annes Brown who has kindly agreed to update her Preface to this edition and who has provided me with her enlightening advice and suggestions.

PREFACE

SARAH ANNES BROWN

When we think of the Elizabethan Ovidian erotic narrative the two texts which most immediately spring to mind are Marlowe’s and Shakespeare’s and Adonis . These polished and sophisticated works of the 1590s owe a debt, not only to the , but to a pervasive culture of English Ovidianism created in part by many earlier English poets, most of them almost unknown today. This welcome volume brings together four striking poems by earlier Elizabethan writers. Only one of these, Orpheus his Journey to Hell , surprisingly, has since been republished, yet each one is a fascinating example of ’s rich and varied influence on English poetry.

Although they are products of an earlier, and poetically less sophisticated, age than that of Shakespeare and Marlowe, these poems are not without their own wit and subtlety. This is perhaps particularly true of Thomas Peend’s Hermaphroditus and Salmacis . Although the narrative ostensibly condemns the idle Salmacis and sympathises with Hermaphroditus’ disdain for her, there are indications, as Sophie Chiari points out, that the poet’s real position may be a little more uncertain. Is he in fact rather attracted by the idea of the nymph and youth uniting to form a single androgynous being? It is certainly striking that the poet concludes with an extended admiring address to yet does not once mention that the prophet was himself (in a sense) a . Even the very helpful glossary of names provided by Peend at the end of his text only offers a revealingly brief note: “An olde Prophet of the Cytie Thebes , in Boetia , a countrey in Attica . And is nowe called Vandalia .” It is almost as though Peend is staging an anxiety about disclosing too much about Tiresias, replacing the true facts of his story with a stuttering accumulation of superfluous geographical detail. Perhaps the textual apparatus supplied by Peend, like that appended to another poem with a Tiresian narrator, The Waste Land , needs to be taken with a pinch of salt.

The poem’s refusal to identify Tiresias as an hermaphrodite, when coupled with the fact that the poet clearly feels an affinity with the xii Preface prophet, may encourage the reader to look again at the actual moment of metamorphosis in Peend’s poem. In the original story Ovid describes how the gods accede to Salmacis’ plea that she and Hermaphroditus may be united forever. But Peend alters the original, asserting instead that “Venus then” was “moued with theyr mone” (ll. 305-06). The word “theyr” oddly fuses the apparently quite opposed wishes of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis, and the fact that it is Venus who intervenes seems particularly surprising considering that she is Hermaphroditus’ own mother. Why would she work against her child? But perhaps she doesn’t. The reader who knows Ovid’s version will probably assume that Peend’s Hermaphroditus is devastated to be transformed. Yet Peend employs a more neutral vocabulary than Ovid to describe both the coalescence of Hermaphroditus with Salmacis and the subsequent transformation of the waters. In the Metamorphoses the waters are changed “incesto [...] medicamine,” a phrase which might be translated by “an impure drug,” whereas Peend (l. 329) uses the phrase “vertue straunge” (strange). Even though the resonances of the word “virtue” were less unequivocally positive in the XVI th century the wording used by Peend still seems softer than its Latin equivalent. The recasting of a curse into a blessing appears to be confirmed when Peend wraps up the story:

Thus both in wysh they did agree: And now contentyd well they bee (331-32)

The tone of calm content seems at odds with the stern moralising which follows. Peend warns young men against being drowned in “fylthy sinne” (l. 384) and paints a picture of a bitter fallen youth who will spitefully “ioye to see his wyshe / on others in like sort” (ll. 394-95). It is as though, rather as is the case with the final Salmacis/Hermaphroditus compound itself, there are two voices in the poem struggling for mastery, one of which disapproves of sexual looseness and ambiguity, and another which finds the teasing liminality of the rather alluring. This ambivalence, this readiness to see two sides of any story, is typical of an age in which the practice of composing arguments in utramque partem dominated education. If Peend’s poem seems unsure what to make of itself it can be read as a precursor to later more complexly and famously ambiguous texts such as Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure or Coriolanus . The Elizabethans, like Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream , typically looked at the world “with parted eye when everything seems double” (4.1.188-89).

Renaissance Tales of Desire xiii

The second poem included in this edition, Underdowne’s Theseus and Ariadne , is similarly ambiguous. As Chiari notes, the text’s surface misogyny seems (at least partly) satirical or playful. In the preface Underdowne addresses the reader with a careless sprightliness, and in his prefatory poem, “A Rule for Women to Brynge up their Daughters,” he advises mothers to visit terrible punishments, including death, on their recalcitrant offspring but rather undermines the advice by concluding:

Therfore ye mothers, if ye use and kepe my rules in mynde: Daughters you shall have none at all, or those of Phenyx kynde. (21-4)

Many readers will want to discover what new light these poems might shed on Shakespeare’s own Ovidianism. Chiari identifies an intriguing little clue to a possible link between Theseus and Ariadne and A Midsummer Night’s Dream , a play in which Theseus of course appears. In Underdowne’s “Preface to the reader,” she suggests, there is an of St Paul’s letter to the Corinthians which just might have caught the eye of Shakespeare, and fed into Bottom’s own memorable misquotation of the passage. A number of parallels between various aspects of the Theseus story and A Midsummer Night’s Dream have been identified by critics. As Peter Holland notes, “naming Hermia’s father Egeus cannot [...] be a completely innocent act” (Holland 1994, 146). 1 Holland goes on to link Aegeus’ near (accidental) murder of his son, a story which can be found in Book VII of the Metamorphoses , with Egeus’ tyrannical willingness to have his daughter Hermia put to death. The metamorphosis of Bottom suggests a double point of contact with the Theseus legend. Bottom has frequently been compared with such victims of metamorphosis as Apuleius’ Lucius and Ovid’s . But he also has affinities with two related characters from Theseus’ story. His hybrid form suggests the minotaur as readily as Actaeon and, as the bizarrely inappropriate object of desire for a powerful female, he also recalls the minotaur’s father, the bull who is persuaded to mate with Pasiphae.

If we take up Sophie Chiari’s invitation to speculate about the influence of Underdowne on Shakespeare we can identify further possible affinities between his particular version of Theseus and Ariadne and A

1 Although Theseus’ father’s name is spelled “Aegeus” today, the spelling “Egeus” was common in the XVI th century.

xiv Preface

Midsummer Night’s Dream . We’ve already seen that the poet invokes (but almost certainly dismisses) the possibility of a parent treating a wayward daughter with the utmost severity. Before he finally undermines his own advice through ridicule, in the stanza quoted above, he toys with some pretty horrific scenarios. The mother is advised to cut off her daughter’s hands, blind her, sew her lips together, break her , and finally put her in the grave, if she fails to obey. The invocation of extreme harshness which is then comically undercut might recall the threat of execution which hangs over Hermia, a threat which is finally dismissed by Theseus’ fiat. Underdowne, like Peend, doesn’t seem quite sure what to make of his material, his characters. In his preface he inveighs against Phaedra’s treacherous treatment of her sister. Yet in the poem she seems sensibly cautious and perfectly well disposed towards Ariadne. His portrait of the two sisters might provide us with another possible clue that Shakespeare was familiar with Underdowne. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream we are offered a similarly contradictory depiction of two girls, Hermia and Helena, who begin the play bosom friends, “two lovely berries moulded on one stem” (3.2.211), yet are transformed into bitter rivals. And by transposing his Ariadne into an English idiom and setting, Underdowne reveals her similarities with Shakespeare’s Hermia, similarly scared and abandoned:

Amyd a forest wylde and wyde, For beares or wolves a pray He leaveth me a sleepe, and he Falsely doth go his waye. (525-8)

Both Demetrius and Lysander temporarily play the part of Theseus, forgetting their first love to run after a girl who seems still more attractive. It is possible that the presence of Theseus in the play, at one very specific moment in his life, distracts readers from noting parallels with different episodes in his story, parallels which, as here, temporarily cast a different character in the Theseus role.

There is perhaps less in Hubbard’s Ceyx and Alcione to make us wonder whether Shakespeare might have had access to the poem. Yet it too may encourage us to reconsider the relationship between Shakespeare and Ovid, for it serves as a reminder of the way in which, although the Metamorphoses has proved one of the most continually influential poems in Western literature, readers from different ages have valued different episodes from the work. Today such as those of Arachne,

Renaissance Tales of Desire xv and Pygmalion are most likely to be recognised and appreciated. Renaissance readers would have been well acquainted with these stories, but would have been equally enthusiastic about episodes which are now comparatively little known. These include the section on Pythagoras from Book XV—and the tale of Ceyx and . Perhaps because this moving story of a devoted married couple who are parted by death but reunited by metamorphosis is comparatively little known today, its influence on the works of Shakespeare has been examined less intently than the impact of Pygmalion or Actaeon, although Jonathan Bate has analysed its presence in .

One passage from Shakespeare which is said to derive from Ceyx and Alcyone is Imogen’s description of her leavetaking of Posthumus in Cymbeline (1.3.17-22, Met XI.466-73). Reading Hubbard’s extended retelling of the myth may encourage the reader to think further about the relationship between Ceyx and Alcyone and Cymbeline . It may be that Imogen’s poignant speech isn’t simply an isolated Ovidian spangle but just one aspect of a more pervasive influence. Hubbard’s response to the tale is typical of its time in displaying some reservations about the behaviour of Ceyx, reservations not present in the original Metamorphoses . His wish to consult foreign is cast as a credulous delusion by Hubbard (as it is in Golding’s translation). If we attend to the Elizabethan reception of Ceyx’ character, as a man whose judgement is flawed, we are more likely to see how his story aligns with that of Posthumus, who is similarly led astray by bad council. Imogen hints that she, like Alcyone, has been visited by a vision of her husband:

What is it to be false? To lie in watch there, and to think of him? To weep twixt clock and clock? If sleep charge nature, To break it with a fearful dream of him, And cry myself awake? That’s false to’s bed, is it? (3.4.38-42)

Alcyone also “cries herself awake” after she receives her own vision of her husband (XI.677). Later Imogen will yet again be disturbed by a simulacrum of Posthumus when she finds the headless body of Cloten dressed in her husband’s clothes. Alcyone, too, is mistaken about the nature of her encounter with her “husband.” Although the vision which appears to her seems to be Ceyx’ ghost it is really only a counterfeit forged by Morpheus. The loving couple in Cymbeline are parted by distrust rather than death, and are reunited in life rather than in miraculous metamorphosis.

xvi Preface

Yet there are many points of contact between their story and that of Ceyx and Alcyone, particularly if, like Hubbard, our instinct is to think Ceyx’s wish to consult an a sign of foolishness rather than a proof of pietas . Of course Posthumus’ credulity has a different focus. He believes his wife unfaithful to him. But we can find a link between these two apparently quite different types of credulity in another of Shakespeare’s late plays, The Winter’s Tale . Here Leontes, mistrustful of his wife Hermione, sends his messengers to consult an oracle. And in the play by Shakespeare whose links with Ceyx and Alcyone have perhaps been established most clearly, Othello , the husband’s credulity is also focused on his wife’s supposed infidelity rather than on superstitious errors. “Yet, for all the variations of plot, there is a fundamental affinity in terms of emotional effect,” concludes Bate at the end of his account of the links between Othello and Ceyx and Alcyone (Bate 2001, 186). It could be argued that his words are still more applicable to the connections between Ovid’s story and Cymbeline .

But it would be a pity if these poems were only read as anticipations of Shakespeare’s own Ovidianism, as footnotes to his more celebrated works. They repay attention in their own right. Although very different from one another all three poems reveal characteristics common both to Ovid and to the later Elizabethan age, helping to explain why Ovid was so central to the literature of this period. They are all preoccupied with the feelings, thoughts and actions of women in the throes of passion, women whom they may view with sympathy, disapproval or (more commonly) confused ambivalence.

This ambivalence certainly typifies the fourth poem included here, Orpheus his Journey to Hell . Chiari notes R. B.’s emphasis on Orpheus’ failure to consummate his love for Eurydice, and this may invite the reader to elide the journey to Hell with the sexual act it replaces and negates, rather as the penetration of Adonis by the boar seems to mirror the impossible rape of the reluctant youth which Shakespeare’s Venus pants to perform. 2 In the first poem included in this volume, Peend’s Hermaphroditus and Salmacis , Salmacis’ pool was a troubling site of emasculation and confusion, simultaneously strangely alluring and a place of punishment from which other young men must be protected. Hell, similarly, for R. B. seems to represent both the anguish of unfulfilled desire and disappointment,

2 This possible elision between Eurydice herself and Hell is touched on by Kenneth Borris in “R[ichard] B[arnfield’s Homosocial Engineering in Orpheus His Journey to Hell ” (2001, 343).

Renaissance Tales of Desire xvii even horror, at its consummation. This is hinted at in the description of love’s transitory nature. We are told that love ‘being quicklie sproong, / Dies oftentimes when as it is but yoong (65-6). It might at first seem that this is a description of the death of passion, but we are then informed of the death of Eurydice herself. This slippage might encourage the reader to wonder whether the violence and shock of the serpent’s bite and Eurydice’s sudden death are a veiled substitution for the decay of desire, even its replacement by revulsion, following . The hint at an anxiety about female sexuality in the phrase ‘poysoned wound’ (121) is perhaps compounded by Orpheus’ lament that the gods could allow themselves ‘to mixt sweet beauty with deformity’ (158). ‘Deformity’ is much more commonly used to describe something simply ugly or misshapen, rather than a life-threatening injury.

The description of Hell itself resonates with other contemporary misogynistic expressions of disgust at female sexuality:

When Orpheus looking to the sulphurish flame, And foggy smokes ascending from that pit: Oft times repeates his lovers pleasing name, Wishing himself might by her rest and sit (265-8)

A direct, humorous parallel between hell and female sexuality is offered by Boccaccio in Decameron (10.3), his bawdy tale of a naïve girl who is persuaded that the sexual act enables the devil to be put in ‘hell.’ More disgust—and a closer parallel with R. B.—can be found in King Lear :

[...] Down from the waist They’re , though women all above. But to the girdle do the gods inherit; Beneath is all the fiend’s. There’s hell, there’s darkness, there is the sulphurous pit, burning, scalding, stench, consumption. Fie, fie, fie; pah, pah! (4.5.121-26)

Such an interpretation is, of course, at odds with the surface narrative of R. B.’s poem. Orpheus laments at great length that he and Eurydice have been robbed of the chance to consummate their love. The path which takes him through the ‘rustie gates of death’ (271) seems very different from the longed for destination which lies behind the ‘gates of blisse’ (579). But the implication that Eurydice represents Hell as well as Heaven both reflects and shapes the complexity of the story’s conclusion. Orpheus’ fatal glance seems simultaneously the effect of an unconquerable desire for his wife, and an irresistible urge to lose her forever. This association between

xviii Preface female sexuality and fearful disgust seems confirmed in R. B.’ s description of the poet’s murder at the hands of enraged women:

Till to the watrie oceans greedy wombe. They carie him for to go seeke his tombe. (701-2)

One might perhaps expect to find a rhyme between ‘womb’ and ‘tomb’ within the context of an expression of elegiac regret for the brief span of a man’s life. But here the ‘womb’ is clearly voracious and sexual rather than nurturing or maternal.

It is fitting that this final addition to the volume ends with a troubling juxtaposition of death and desire in the ocean. As Chiari observes, despite their emphasis on passion it is water rather than the fire which is the element in these poems and all of them are characterised by a certain textual fluidity as well, a fondness for intriguing gaps, jumps and ellipses, demanding that the reader work hard to identify—and perhaps create—the text’s tone and meaning. Like Ovid’s original Metamorphoses , they seem to accommodate different perspectives simultaneously, and it is this shifting quality which ensures that these texts, like their model, elude, yet also of course invite, definitive interpretation.

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

1. Editorial procedures

Only one edition by Thomas Colwell of Thomas Peend’s The Pleasant Fable of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis is extant. Published in 1565, it consists of a 48 page quarto. The title-page is immediately followed by the dedication to Nycholas Sentleger, which covers two pages. The rest of the text consists of the epyllion and of a glossary of mythological figures. For this edition, I have relied on the copy available at the Bodleian Library through the Internet site Early English Books on Line (EEBO). The text of The Excellent Hystorie of Theseus and Ariadne , written by Thomas Underdowne, was printed by Richard Johns and was published for the first and last time in 1566. It consists of a 32 page quarto. The title- page is followed by “The Preface to the Reader” and by a small poem entitled “A Rule for Women to Brynge up their Daughters.” The 20 remaining pages of the text are devoted to the epyllion proper. The copy I have consulted comes from John Rylands University Library in Manchester. The Tragicall and Lamentable Histoire of Two Faithfull Mates , written by W. Hubbard, was never to be republished after 1569. Printed by William How, it consists of a 16 page quarto. The epyllion begins immediately after the title-page. I have been working on the copy of the Bodleian Library. The printed text of Orpheus his Journey to Hell and his Musicke to the Ghostes is anonymous as it is only attributed to a certain R. B. Gent. Published in 1595 and printed by R. [Richard] Jones, it consists of 24 pages in quarto. I first based my edition on the text available at the British Library. However, this copy does not have any title-page, and everything before quire B is lacking, which means that the available text includes neither the dedication by the printer “to Anthony Copley, Esq.,” nor the address to the readers. Moreover, the last page which has probably been torn off badly affects the reading of the poem. On top of that, in the online EEBO version, ten stanzas are missing. 1 So I consulted the only other extant copy of Orpheus his Journey to Hell . This complete text is still in

1 This problem has already been pointed out by DeNeef 1992, 50. 2 General Introduction the collection of Arthur Houghton Jr., but a negative photocopy of this original was obtained by the Folger Library in Wahsington D.C. in 1947 when the item was in the collection of A.S.W. Rosenwald. Apparently it passed to Houghton sometime after this. I therefore worked on the photocopied documents graciously provided by the Folger Shakespeare Library. As a consequence, all the missing passages of the British Library copy are reproduced in the present volume. It is worth noting that they have also been carefully reprinted by a specialist of Renaissance literature and critical theory, Professor A. Leigh DeNeef, in his 1992 edition of the poem (see bibliography), to which I will regularly refer hereafter. Because of their small size and relatively small length, poetic pamphlets were ephemeral by essence. Like most of poetry in print by 1600, The Pleasant Fable of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis , The Excellent Hystorie of Theseus and Ariadne , The Tragicall and Lamentable Histoire of Two Faithfull Mates and Orpheus his Journey to Hell were probably “sold unbound, often destroyed through repeated handling, and therefore usually lost,” which explains that few copies actually survived (Marotti 2000, 266). The four epyllia reproduced here are based on the original text of their first, and unique, publication at the time. Let’s note, however, that in 1866, The Tragicall and Lamentable Histoire of Two Faithfull Mates by Hubbard was reproduced in a volume devoted to what was then termed “old English literature,”2 but to my knowledge, the poem has never been reissued since that date.3 More importantly and as mentioned earlier on in this general introduction, DeNeef reedited Orpheus his Journey to Hell about twenty years ago in the 89 th volume of Studies of Philology .4 In spite of this and of a fine and carefully elaborated study preceding the text, I nonetheless chose to include this Ovidian minor epic in the present volume, not only because I wanted to add new elements of analysis, but also because R. B.’s poem, “the longest Orpheus [one] of the age” (DeNeef 1992, 20), is definitely worth being published and newly annotated in a book entirely devoted to Renaissance epyllia. To put it differently, it is within the broader context of this specific genre that the characteristics of R. B.’s text are likely to be grasped by the general

2 Hubbard’s poem was indeed part of J. P. Collier’s anthology entitled Illustrations of old English Literature (3 volumes). For further details, see bibliography. 3 Exception made of the first edition of the present volume, Renaissance Tales of Desire (2009), which already included Hubbard’s text. 4 The poem has also been recently reproduced in George Klawitter’s Poems of Richard Barnfield (2005), but the edition is not annotated, “because the verses read quite well on their own” (viii) . See bibliography. Renaissance Tales of Desire 3 reader, all the more so as Orpheus His Journey to Hell has received much critical attention in recent years. Obvious misprints (e.g. turned letters in Orpheus his Journey to Hell , ll. 557-58) have been silently corrected. In spite of a few archaic terms and formulations, the four poems I have chosen to introduce and reproduce in this volume pose no particular problem of understanding. This is the reason why I have decided against a modern-spelling edition, in order to preserve the charm and qualities of the original, strange or unfamiliar as it may sound at times. For instance, prepositions have been kept in their original forms such as “ore” for “over” (or in compound verbs such as “orerule,” “oreturn” etc). However, capitalization has been systematically normalised to follow modern usage. It has thus been slightly modified so that only names of places and characters, as well as some specific lines (e.g. odd lines in Hubbard’s Tragicall and Lamentable Histoire of Two Faithfull Mates ), retain an initial capital letter in the present volume. Similarly, italics have been restricted to proper as well as place names and to their adjectival forms. However, the present edition deliberately avoids the use of italics when the original text does not contain any italicised word (e.g. Thomas Underdowne’s Excellent Hystorie of Theseus and Ariadne ). 5 If anything, the roman and italic fonts, more and more used for the printed edition of poetry by the end of the XVI th century, “signalled humanist intellectual and social elitism” (Marotti 2000, 266). Letter elisions signalled by a tilde placed over a particular letter have been suppressed (thus “wh ē” becomes “when”), and superscript letters have also been omitted (“ is ters” is normalized into “maisters”). Moreover, “i” and “v” have been rendered into “j” and “u” when necessary (“Ioue” is now spelt “Jove”), in order to facilitate comprehension. As far as past tense and past participles are concerned, endings in –ed have been printed without accent, but elisions have been kept to respect the scansion of the poems. Because matters of repunctuation are generally contentious, the original punctuation, which made sense, has here been faithfully followed, even though occasional irregularities, oversights, or obvious mistakes have been corrected (in Thomas Peend’s glossary, for instance, all the entries

5 The use of italics did not depend on writers, but on printers. Incidentally, English printers started using italics in 1524, with Wynkyn de Worde’s edition of Wakefield’s Oratio de laudibus trium linguarum . According to Joseph Loewenstein, “[i]n the rhetoric of the English page, the italic is the master-trope. To print in italics is to fracture the English body type, and to assert a human claim on the written […]” (Loewenstein 2002, 76). 4 General Introduction are now systematically followed by a full stop, which was not the case in the original edition). The general introduction draws attention to the question of the Elizabethan vogue Ovidianism and to the epyllion as a specific genre. The separate introductions to each text are designed to present these Ovidian poems in their original context, and to explore the interdependence of the epyllia and of the classical, medieval and contemporary texts dealing with the same mythological material. Editorial notes will mainly account for the numerous mythological characters present in all four texts and as such, they should be simply taken as reading aids. These aids can be usefully complemented by works such as Pierre Grimal’s Dictionary of Classical Mythology or the Oxford Companion to Classical Civilization , among others. Of course, nothing actually replaces descriptions and definitions by early modern writers. There is indeed a wide choice of XVI th -century mythographies and moralizations. For this, one generally thinks of Stephen ( The Golden Booke of the Leaden Gods , London, 1577), of Abraham Fraunce (“The Third part of the Countesse of Pembrokes Yvychurche. Entituled, Amintas Dale” in The Countesse of Pembrokes Yvychurch , London, 1592), or of Richard Lynche ( The Fountaine of Ancient Fiction , London, 1599). 6 Unfortunately, such works were not available to Peend, Underdowne and Hubbard. So it was necessary to find an earlier source. Because Thomas Cooper’s 1565 Thesaurus (shelfmark X.985/104 at the British Library) was such a massive achievement at the time, and above all because it included a list of proper names at the end (“Dictionarium historicum et poeticum propria locorum et personarum vocabula breviter complectens”), its entries were depended on as often as necessary. It should be specified however that Peend probably did not use Cooper’s volume since his poem was also published in 1565. Still, Cooper perfectly conveys the beliefs of the time which must also have more or less corresponded to those of Thomas Peend. The glosses in the notes are all supported by references to the OED , but these are only specified when dealing with some unusual sense. When appropriate, footnotes will also include points of interpretation or comparison.

6 These three texts were gathered by Garland Publishing in a single volume which appeared in 1976. Renaissance Tales of Desire 5

2. The Elizabethan epyllion 7

In the second half of the XVI th century, readers kept praising ethical writings, chronicles and romances directly inherited from the Middle Ages. However, the “truly smart reading matter” was “erotic and satirical verse” (Harbage 1952, 76), mostly inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses . What Harbage calls “erotic and satirical verse” partly fits the fluctuating definition of the epyllion. Jim Ellis explains that “like their source, epyllia are involved in what might be called ironic aetiology, often featuring, in a semi-comic way, tales of how things came to be the way they are” (Ellis 2001, 38). This is true for the poems reproduced in this volume. The Pleasant Fable of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis rewrites the genesis of the hermaphrodite figure, The Excellent Hystorie of Theseus and Ariadne explains how “the goddes did [Ariadne] translate / into the starrye skye” (ll. 549-50), The Tragicall and Lamentable Histoire of Two Faithfull Mates concludes just before the metamorphoses of the two lovers into seabirds, and Orpheus his Journey to Hell ends on the god’s decision “draw up” Orpheus’ “heavenlie instrument” (l. 708). Even though Renaissance epyllia were published from the mid-XVI th century onwards, they were “[w]ritten for the most part in the last decade of the sixteenth century, and generally produced within the milieu of the Inns of Court” (Ellis 2001, 38). The correlation between poet and lawyer was not surprising as such. It mainly depended upon oratorical skills, new printing processes, and increased textualisation. Paul Raffield observes that

[a]t an institutional level, the development of a textual system of law enabled the hermeneutic skills of the poet to be practiced and improved in the working environment of the courtroom. Judgement became a task of literary interpretation: the meaning of previously recorded, written narratives was inferred and construed, to a greater or lesser extent, according to the subjective understanding of individual judges. (Raffield 2004, 41)

No wonder then if a small group of law students chose to make the practice of educational exercises more attractive by writing witty poems presenting fictitious erotic narratives. These appealed to the sexual desires of their readers by depicting alluring amorous situations in highly

7 The word “epyllion” comes from the Greek “little epos ,” “scrap of poetry.” According to The Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory , “[t]he sense of ‘little epic’ appears to date from the 19 th c., when it was used to describe a short narrative poem in dactylic hexameters” (Cuddon 1991, 304). 6 General Introduction rhetorical terms, and which could be debated as so many equivalents of judicial cases. As such, they generally included a robust metrical pattern (quite different, though, from the epic form of dactylic hexameters used by and Roman poets),8 numerous allusions to mythology, dense imagery, and erotic undertones. According to Nicolas Buté, the strictly codified rhetoric of as applied to minor epics allowed Renaissance poets to substitute a love story to the narration of heroic adventures (Buté 2004, 262): in the Elizabethan epyllion, the epic warrior is thus metamorphosed into the mock-Petrarchan lover. As noted by June Waudby, “lengthy monologues and digressions from the main storyline” were in fact “devices intrinsic to the genre” (Waudby 2010, 64), and one could add with Paul W. Miller that “the epyllionic digression is often fully as important as the main story and sometimes even more important, the main story serving as its framework” (Miller 1958, 32). The Renaissance epyllion was generally (but not exclusively) written by a university-educated, middle-class writer who circulated it among his friends before having it published,9 and it was primarily addressed to learned young men, not just conversant with Ovid’s Metamorphoses , but able to replace the classical allusions in their original contexts and to grasp the witty tone as well as the full implications of a number of subversive love stories. Dympna Callaghan has already underlined the importance of the “epyllion of the 1590s.” This is how she sums up her argument:

Precisely because it eschewed moral and political purposes in favour of eroticism and myth, Ovidian comedy, although it proved more difficult to contain than satire, was as widely condemned. Purged of all moral and political aims, this striking absence of purpose was perfected in the epyllion, rendering it not only a purer form of comedy, but also a supremely and irreducibly literary one. (Callaghan 2003, article abstract)

8 On this see Waudby 2010, 64. In a short but useful introduction to the Renaissance epyllion, June Waudby explains that the classical epyllion “was typically around five hundred lines in length and took its subject matter from mythology, often including forbidden amorous passions.” By contrast, the minor epics of the Elizabethan poets “are generally much longer than their Greek and Roman models, ranging from Lodge’s Scylla’s Metamorphosis at a relatively short 786 lines to Shakespeare’s extended Venus and Adonis , weighing in at 1,194 lines.” 9 This was probably the case of Thomas Lodge’s Scylla’s Metamorphosis (written c. 1584-88, and published in 1589). Renaissance Tales of Desire 7

There is no denying the fact that the epyllion was first and foremost a “literary” exercise which developed an economy of pleasure. However, it seems that what has sometimes been regarded as a minor genre was not totally “purged” of “political aims.” Indeed, the legalistic vocabulary at work in many of these poems as well as the systematic questioning of licit vs. illicit sexual practices clearly show that the poets themselves were interested in the politics of the Elizabethan age, and were keen to propose alternative model for the society they lived in. Precisely because the epyllion totally disappeared after the first years of James I’s reign, its belonging to a clearly delimited political period, corresponding with the reign of Elizabeth I, is too obvious to be neglected. As such, epyllia must necessarily be studied in context. The homoerotic representations so commonly found in satiric and erotic poetry, for instance, are to be read against a precise historical background. In 1533, the first statute prohibiting buggery was enacted, and in 1562, sodomy was once again forbidden by a new Elizabethan law. In both cases, what was prescribed was capital punishment, even though sodomy was rapidly considered as a minor felony whose consequences could not be compared to those of much more dangerous crimes such as murder or treason.10 On 1 June 1599 however, radical and unexpected measures where taken against controversial publications which included licentious pamphlets.11 Suddenly, authors were no longer free to write what they wanted and could no longer rely on the censorship’s lenience. Georgia E. Brown observes that

[t]he scurrilous activity generated by the epyllion did not go unnoticed by the authorities. On 1 June 1599, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London issued an order banning the publication of erotic and satiric texts. They also called in such texts as were in circulation so that they could be burned by the hangman. (Brown 2004, 105).

Archbishop Whitgift’s and Bishop Bancroft’s motives were not clear. It has been argued that the topicality of the targeted texts infuriated them, or that they actually aimed at stopping an increasingly flourishing literature devoted to emasculation. Whatever their true reasons were, they were not to be disobeyed, and satires as well as

10 On this, see chapter 1 of Barry Richard Burg’s Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition: English Sea Rovers in the Seventeenth Century Caribbean (1995). 11 For further details on the 1599 Bishop’s ban, see chapter 9 of Cyndia Susan Clegg’s Press Censorship in Elizabethan England (2004). 8 General Introduction erotic works were recalled and destroyed. In other terms, their wide- sweeping ban certainly did not have a lasting impact, but it had immediate consequences, and some of Marston’s texts such as The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s Image (1598) and The Scourge of Villainy (1598) were publicly burned. The authors of Elizabethan epyllia who played with the strictures of their time were indeed quite bold, but until 1599, the year when the Archbishop and the Bishop took them by surprise, they seem to have been perfectly aware of what they could write without being disturbed by the censors.12 Most of them produced minor epics at the beginning of their literary careers, as they were still ambitious young men who enjoyed taking calculated risks. They knew that they could hardly be blamed for their frankly sexualized male and female characters. The latter were inspired by classical models, and as such, they were safe from moralistic polemic. Mythology thus constituted a shield for authors who could use learned references to “brea[k] taboos of and age through a figure who is at once erotic and maternal” 13 (Brown 2000, 95), explore same-sex desire, or expose their own fantasies of rape as well as their imagery of sublimated eroticism. Their productions, fraught with misogynous undertones, sexual ambiguities and illicit love affairs, were fundamentally revisionist, literary pieces which, by the end of the XVI th century, managed to radically undermine genre distinctions and to redefine, if not totally abolish, the differences between the sexes.14 The generic hybridity of the epyllion is indeed a recurrent characteristic which allowed authors to question and parody traditional literary forms including pastoral, satire, poetic complaint, Petrarchanism, and epic poetry. Doing so, not only did they radicalize the , they also challenged the moral assumptions of their potential readers as well as those of their own patrons, i.e, more often than not, the dedicatees of their prose.

12 Robert W. Maslen notes that well before the 1590s, “[t]he potentially harmful effects of erotic poetry were certainly taken seriously by the Elizabethan censors. The most celebrated poet of the 1570s, George Gascoigne, had a least one collection of poetry withdrawn from the circulation by the ecclesiastical High Commission, the body responsible for vetting printed texts” (Maslen 2002, 24). 13 i.e., like Venus in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. 14 The differences between the sexes are never completely undermined in Elizabethan epyllia because their authors actually tend to promote a slightly misogynous perspective which, ironic as it may be, actually tends to emphasize the distinction between men and women. Exceptions, of course, are always possible. Renaissance Tales of Desire 9

About ninety per cent of late Tudor publications were preceded by a sycophantic dedication either to a real patron, or to a potential one. In Elizabethan epyllia, however, dedications are generally “more than convention or sycophancy”: each of them must be read and deciphered against a background of social elitism where the author’s gift “is not a gesture of subservience but a challenge to the recipient’s generosity” (Brown 2000, 94). The dedicatee could be a friend, treated both with respect and irreverence, because he was supposed to accept irony and parody, sometimes at his expense. In all cases, he was considered as part and parcel of a larger all-male élite group made of poets and patrons. As a consequence, the patron associated with a luxurious poem offered a subversive representation of his own personality to the general, anonymous readership. Such a readership was necessarily restricted. Epyllia, which mainly targeted the learned middle class desirous to be acquainted with fashionable and elitist literature, were not as popular as ballads or broadsheets. Their readers were therefore seldom alienated by the sometimes explicit nature of unorthodox desire or the homoerotic attraction between the mythological characters. On the contrary, they must have been pleasantly teased by the authors’ irreverent playing with erotic clichés and Petrarchan images. On top of that, the readers of epic poetry could more or less easily identify with the writers, who were used to leaving in their lines a number of clues regarding their own opinions and positions. As Nicolas Buté puts it, “lapidary formulae betray the emphatic presence of the poet within his own text and promote a dialogue between the author and his readers—a dialogue which characterizes the best poems in the genre” (Buté 2004, 263). 15 Readers, though, had to develop specific skills to grasp the full meaning of erotic poems whose multivalent nature were primarily intended to please a much smaller audience. Indeed, minor epics reproduced the poetic and erotic nature of the manuscript culture favored by nobles and literati alike. As such, they were concerned with mutability, and connected to large-scale changes in the society. During the reign of Elizabeth I, the nature of literature itself changed very quickly due to the birth of a new market for printed poetry, which “provided vicarious access to such elite social and intellectual worlds as the court, the Inns of Court, the university, and the great houses of

15 “Les formules lapidaires trahissent la très forte présence du poète dans son texte, et instaurent un dialogue entre auteur et lecteur qui est l’une des qualités essentielles des meilleurs poèmes du genre.” My translation. 10 General Introduction the aristocracy” (Marotti 2000, 263). The readers of Elizabethan epyllia thus thoroughly enjoyed the rhetorical virtuosity of these poems, precisely because they conveyed the rhetorical skills of an élite mainly composed of law students, always prone to renegotiate the orthodoxy of desire in a masculine, sometimes misogynous coterie, and whose ambitions did not a preclude licentious behavior. The pagan world of Ovid’s Metamorphoses provided these young men with a very suitable hypotext, easily transformable, both in substance and form.

3. Early Modern Ovidianism

As explained by Collin Burrow in an enlightening article devoted to Ovid’s Renaissance afterlives, Ovid himself was already concerned with the transmission of his own texts. 16 From 1500 onwards, “[c]ommentators begin to draw attention increasingly to the rhetorical surface of Ovid’s works,” Burrow explains (2002, 302). He goes on as follows:

Many of his readers and imitators presented Ovid as someone who you would want to read under the desk in the back row of the classroom: Johannes Secundus began his cyle of erotic neo-Latin elegies (posthumously printed in 1539) by explaining that he chose erotic subjects for his poems (which imitate the Amores and the decidedly un-schooly Ars amatoria ) in order to prevent grammarians using his works as school texts. (304) 17

Thus, Ovid is regarded as a subversive poet providing his readers with what this critic calls “the wicked pleasures of Ovidianism” (304). In Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (1593), Lavinia probably turns the pages of the Metamorphoses as she glances through the pages of her own life. 18 If early modern educated women read Ovid’s verse, male readers certainly delighted in the subtle titillation of pagan joys and polymorphous desire. Studies in Ovidianism show how deep the influence of Ovid’s Metamorphoses penetrated into early modern literature and thus contributed to the refashioning of England’s cultural identity. This took

16 See for instance Ovid’s Tristia , 3.3.59-64. Quoted by Burrow 2002, 301. 17 The first English translation of the Ars amatoria was published as early as 1513, and it was entitled The flores of Ovide de arte amandi with theyr englysshe afore them and two alphabete tablys. The fyrst begynneth with the englysshe havyng the laten wordes folowynge. The other with the laten havyng ye englysse wordes folowynge. 18 Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus , 4.1.42-43: “ Young Lucius : Grandsire, ’tis Ovid’s Metamorphoses . / My mother gave it me.” Renaissance Tales of Desire 11 place at a time when medieval values and representations were still deeply ingrained in the minds of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, while important geographic and scientific discoveries allowed pictures from the new world to emerge and appear in print. Ovidian pointed to a revival of hedonism and to an ideal of refinement and eclectic cosmopolitanism among an enlightened or aristocratic élite. Because of the flexibility of myth and because he, as an author, had always been subject to constant rewriting and reformulation over the centuries, Ovid allowed artists to bridge the gap between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. So, his Metamorphoses were all the more appealing since they had become a vast cabinet of curiosities, seeking to portray Love in all its various forms as well as to embrace the world’s profusion within the space of one book. Ovidian myths were not just part of a highbrow culture, even though the numerous bookish references to Ovid in the literature of the time could only be aimed at the learned part of the population. For the illiterate (roughly 80 per cent of the population), the signs of inns and public houses, the garden designs, plays alluding to Ovid’s stories, engravings reproducing scenes from the Metamorphoses or the mythical symbols and representations on the portraits of the Virgin Queen had made these images, or themes, familiar elements that had progressively become part of their environment. On the one hand, authors like Marlowe, Shakespeare or Chapman, who most relied on Ovid, tended to focus on a rather materialistic vision of existence, insofar as one can use the term “materialistic” to define a much more complex perspective on life, emphasizing love and carnal pleasure, and which necessarily implied repeated violations of decorum. Asserting one’s interest for Ovidian paganism may have been an implicit means of professing one’s belief in a hedonistic conception of life while declaring one’s atheism at a time when it was regarded as a most serious charge close to treason. Since Elizabeth I had become the head of the Church, any form of opposition to the Church of England ipso facto was interpreted as an opposition to the Queen herself. Marlowe is indeed strongly suspected to have favoured both Ovidianism and atheism (Honan 2005, 184-85 and 245-48), as a member of the so-called “School of Night” 19 —a group of free-thinking intellectuals under the patronage of Sir Walter Raleigh with such eminent figures as Thomas Harriot, John Florio and John Dee. While

19 The expression actually derives from a passage in Act 4 of ’s Love’s Labour’s Lost , in which Navarre exclaims “Black is the badge of hell / The hue of dungeons and the school of night” (4.3.252-53). 12 General Introduction his Hero and Leander 20 reverberates throughout Shakespeare’s own narrative poetry and defines a new, subtle Ovidian mode, one may wonder whether some early minor literary texts belonging to the same vein influenced Marlowe’s or Shakespeare’s verse and, if so, to what extent. In Hubbard’s The Tragicall and lamentable Histoire of two faithfull mates: Ceyx Kynge of Thracine and Alcione his wife , for instance, one can notice intriguing similarities with the myth of Hero and Leander. In both cases, while the woman stands ashore waiting for her beloved, the man is swallowed by the sea and drowns. Hero simply inverts Alcyone’s demeanour in the sense that she wants her lover to swim across the Hellespont to meet her, whereas Alcyone tries to convince her husband that he should not leave. In the end, the result is the same: lovers are sacrificed by the gods. Myths always echo one another, which is not due to their Renaissance interpreters. If Marlowe had read Hubbard’s text, he could have found some stimulating passages reminding him of Hero and Leander and giving him food for thought. In the same way, if Shakespeare had been acquainted with Hubbard’s translation together with Ovid’s Metamorphoses , he could have noticed elements which may have inspired his conception of the characters of Othello and Desdemona. The features they have in common with Ceyx and Alcyone have been called attention to by Jonathan Bate (Bate 2001, 184-86). On the other hand, authors such as Giordano Bruno, 21 Edmund Spenser 22 or Francis Bacon 23 were keen to cultivate a more spiritual approach based on neo-Platonism, discussing sexual love in terms of spiritual bonds, as reflecting the relationship between the individuals and God. Of course, one should nuance such an assertion by acknowledging the fact that the three authors just quoted were also deeply attracted by Ovidianism, though in a different, more explicitly erudite way.

20 Licensed for publication in 1593 but not published until 1598. 21 In his works Bruno expounded a system of philosophy in which the principal elements were neo-Platonism, materialistic , rational mysticism (after the manner of Raymond Lully), and the naturalistic concept of the unity of the material world (inspired by Arabic treatises and by Copernican astronomy). 22 On Spenser’s neo-Platonism, see Yates 1983, chap. IX. 23 On the frontispiece to the 1640 edition of Francis Bacon’s Advancement of Learning , one can notice an oval plaque above Bacon’s head surrounded by a wreath of bay leaves—the poet’s crown of laurels. The inscription on the plaque reads “Tertius a Platone, Philosophiæ Princeps,” which translates as “The Third from Plato, the Leader of Philosophy.” This implies that the first Plato was, of course, Plato himself, and the second Plato was the XV th century Italian scholar Marsilio Ficino.