In Serious Play, Robert W. Hanning offers lively appreciations of three major poets whose works speak comic truth to cultural power. Derived from Hanning's final graduate seminar (and a related lecture series), which he determined to make a “last guffaw” as well as a last hurrah (xi), the book wears its origins lightly and shamelessly, so that the reader experiences the stimulation of that ideal class or lecture that brings a text to life and pricks us to choose among a myriad of possible essay topics and to ride forth in pursuit of a thesis. The “desire” of the book's title is not simply sexual desire, although it seems to be that in the case of Ovid's self-presentation as magister amoris; and the authority that it questions is not simply a censorious Augustan concern for monogamous respectability — although that may have had some bearing on the poet's own exile. Rather, it is increasingly clear as the book progresses that its subject is more broadly the desire to revise the authorized versions of epic and tragedy and celebrate the polyphonic comic vitality of our springtime energies. As the opening sentence of The Canterbury Tales so memorably summarizes this subject, we are all — flowers, birds, and humans — awakened in April and drawn on a pilgrimage that leads toward a tomb, but the stories we weave along the way shape our understanding of that mortal adventure.

Hanning characterizes Ovid's eroticism as “metrosexual,” an elusive term today (straight but not square?), but one that seems apt in underscoring the urbanity and urbanism of Augustan Rome, and the ironic delights of private citizens whose triumphs are limited to the bedroom. Amores 1.9, “Militat omnis amans,” provides a summary of the logic by which epic transitions into some version of chivalric romance. Every lover is a soldier, and women look for the same traits in their lovers that a captain seeks in his men. Cupid has his own camp on every battlefield: great Achilles’ frustrated desire for Briseis took precedence over the battle. And all is fair in love and war: lovers take advantage of a husband's slumber just as Odysseus and Diomedes (Iliad 10) slaughtered the sleeping Rhesus and thereby made possible the defeat of Troy.

These allusions to earlier heroes do not glorify lovers so much as they remind us of the diminished reality that underlies earlier epic. Achilles felt entitled to Briseis as a legitimate spoil of war; it was not Cupid but cupidity that triumphed over him. And the Doloneia in book 10 of the Iliad stands apart from the rest of that poem as an advertisement for the wily and cynical Odysseus who is the real hero of the war, and whose own survival will be the subject of another work. Hanning's three poets all cast a skeptical eye on claims for grand cultural triumphs.

In his portrayal of Orlando's fury, Ariosto (like Chaucer in a different context) asks what women want; his answer is one that Ovid would appreciate. He takes Virgil's story of Nisus and Euryalus (the Doloneia rewritten as a tragic nocturne, two lovers dying heroically for each other) and gives it a happy ending. Cloridano and Medoro vow to bury their dead leader; Cloridano dies defending his friend, who is left for dead and found by Angelica. As the magister amoris himself might have put it, the ideal recipe for erotic success (do not try this at home!) is to risk death in a good cause and marry your nurse. Note that the burial of his leader automatically discharges Medoro from further military service. Meanwhile, the authority of the Chanson de Roland leaves no doubt that once Orlando is restored to his senses he will begin moving again, like Achilles, on the road to his death. What parents would not prefer to see their daughter married to Medoro, whose name reflects this golden mean between the arts of fighting and surviving? It is this celebration of life, in all its moral ambiguities, that characterizes Hanning's three poets, and his Serious Play as well.