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Ovid in English, 1480–1625, Part 1: Metamorphoses. Sarah Annes Brown and Andrew Taylor, eds. MHRA Tudor and Stuart Translations 4 (I). London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2013. xii + 238 pp. $44.99.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Maggie Kilgour*
Affiliation:
McGill University
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Abstract

Type
Reviews
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 2015

The Ovid who ended his Metamorphoses with the triumphant claim that his works would live on must be highly gratified these days. Not only is Ovid himself in fashion, but increasing attention is being paid to his legacy. It is hard to find any other writer who inspired so many later artists. There are certain periods, moreover, including our own, that seem particularly Ovidian. In many ways, Renaissance English literature is variations on doing things with Ovid.

The importance of Ovid in this period makes this new selection from Tudor and Stuart Translations of the Metamorphoses extremely welcome. There have been other valuable selections of Ovidian works, most notably Elizabeth Story Donno’s 1963 Elizabethan Minor Epics and Nigel Alexander’s 1967 Elizabethan Narrative Verse. The current volume differentiates itself from these by focusing on translations, although it admits that at this time the boundary between imitation and original was rather fuzzy. This looseness permits the inclusion of poems with moral commentaries by T.H. and Thomas Peend, and works by William Barksted, Thomas Heywood, and Dunstan Gale that elaborate, often extensively and inventively, on Ovid’s original. The selection is meant to make available less well-known poems. I doubt it will increase the popularity of them all. Even a handsome new modernized edition with notes to help readers slog through some of the more turgid bits of verbiage in T.H.’s Fable of Ovid Treating of Narcissus is unlikely to create converts or make anyone wish that poulter’s measure had had a longer life-span. But such works are illuminating of the process of Englishing Ovid, which was crucial to the development of the poetry of the period.

The editors have grouped the selections around myths: two versions of the story of Narcissus (Caxton and T.H.); one of the judgment of Midas (Thomas Hedley); two of the metamorphosis of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (Golding and Thomas Peend); three of the tale of Myrrha (William Barksted, H.A., and James Gresham); one of Pyramus and Thisbe (Dunstan Gale); and two of Jupiter’s rape of Callisto (Thomas Heywood and George Sandys). Bookended by the translations of Caxton (1480) and Sandys (1621), with Golding in the middle (1565), the selections demonstrate the shifting purposes of translation from education to entertainment — though the omission here of Sandys’s commentary, which shows the moral tradition still going strong, might make this seem simpler than it actually was. The choices foreground some of the key Ovidian figures, notably Narcissus and Hermaphroditus, whose stories provide the basic themes and imagery for much Renaissance poetry. It might have been useful to include versions of other myths that permeate the literature of the time, such as those of Daphne and Philomela — perhaps Heywood’s “Apollo and Daphne” or Gascoigne’s “Story of Philomela.”

The introductions and notes are clear and helpful, explaining obscure terms and offering brief readings of the works, many of which have received little previous critical attention beyond derision. The editors note how the writers picked up on the connections between the individual stories they were telling and the Metamorphoses as a whole. So H.A. links Myrrha to another story of incest when he inserts into his translation a scene from the tale of Byblis, while Peend compares Hermaphroditus to Adonis and Narcissus. The different works include intriguing innovations that reveal sometimes quite subtle readings of Ovid: there are additions of further aitia to Ovid’s own aitiological stories (Barksted, Heywood, Gale) and also omissions (Gale cuts out the metamorphosis of the mulberry), as well as slight but telling changes: T.H. makes Narcissus twenty-one, not sixteen (my guess is that was his own age). Occasionally, revisions show authorial self-consciousness: while in Ovid, the story of Myrrha is told by Orpheus, Barksted makes Orpheus a character in Myrrha’s story. Writers also experiment with Ovidian rhetorical formula. So Barksted invents a metamorphosing satyr, Poplar, who tells Myrrha, “Defiled maid, dost wonder at this change? / O Myrrha, ere my crescent’s beauty change, / Thou shalt be turned into a shape as strange” (lines 686–88) — echoing Metamorphoses 3.97–98 when Cadmus, killing the serpent of Mars, is told: “Why is that Serpent so admir’d by thee? / Agenor’s sonne, a Serpent thou shalt bee.” Heywood’s description of the dis-maid Callisto as “Th’amazèd virgin (scarce a virgin now)” (387) recalls Ovid’s Daedalus, who after the fall of Icarus is “His father, now no father” (Metamorphoses 8.231; Sandys’s translations).

The later works in the collection show how writers began to respond to Ovid through Shakespeare and Marlowe. The volume should be read with copies of Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, and Hero and Leander close by. It is hard not to see the poems here as either leading up to or following after the writers whose exuberant appropriations of Ovid played such an important part in the shaping of English verse.