While Ovid’s legacy in Renaissance England is often constantly explored, M. L. Stapleton persistently maps out the specific reception of the notorious Amores (or Ovidius sine titulo) in Marlowe’s Ovid, after his Harmful Eloquence: Ovid’s Amores from Antiquity to Shakespeare (1996). Marlowe provides the first (and much reprinted) “complete English rendition of the Amores” (6n12). There are two editions carefully explored throughout the volume: the relatively complete (forty-eight poems) All Ovids Elegies (presumably written in the 1580s, circulated in manuscript, published ca. 1603), and Certaine of Ovids Elegies (ten Amores), bound with Sir J. Davies’s Epigrammes, published in 1599 (then banned and censored). Bibliographical matters (Marlowe’s source is the heavily annotated P. Ovidii Nasonis . . . Amatoria [Basle, 1549], edited by Jacob Micyllus, with a commentary by Dominicus Niger [13n.8]), and vexed issues of technical errors in the translation are addressed and quickly dispatched.
Stapleton concentrates on Marlowe’s Ovidian translation (placed as juvenilia) as a “formative intertext” to understand and “explain Marlowe’s Ovidianism . . . by determining exactly how translating the Amores into the Elegies profited him as a writer,” thereby providing “a kind of literary archaeology” for Marlovian writing (7). This study in imitatio and aemulatio, inherent to the Erasmian pedagogy, sets the Elegies in contrast with and in parallel to Marlowe’s dramatic and poetic works.
The intriguing premise, already explored in his previous book — that Ovid as Naso is the desultor amoris, a satirical and fickle narrator undermining his own reliability while competing with his elegiac predecessors (Tibullus, Propertius) — is articulated with Marlowe’s literary self: this persona is picked up by Marlowe as a translator to develop his compositional and poetical technique. Ovid is seen as a mentor for shaping a literary career while also providing underlying elements structuring the whole canon. The desultor’s voice questions the influence Ovid/Naso has on Marlowe, not so much by direct quotes, but rather through affinities: Ovid is not just a praeceptor amoris but also a part of the humanist curriculum.
Carefully placing the Elegies in the wider context of Ovidian translations in the Renaissance, Stapleton argues that they influenced the sonnet-sequence form and acted as proto-model for other elegiac meditations. Yet, in chapter 1, he moves on to discuss the Elegies’ complex structure as potentially dramatic, thus accounting for their histrionic dimension — an analysis endorsed by classicists. The poetical text unveils self-deconstructing, satirical dimensions in a form of erotic vaudeville.
Appraising Ovidian formative affinities in Marlowe’s writing, the order of the last seven chapters follows that of publication (except for the two undated plays, The Massacre at Paris and Edward II, and understandably for his translation of the Pharsalia, only referred to passim but indexed). Chapter 2 deals with the two parts of Tamburlaine to point out “unexpected correspondences” (59) between the translation and the play in poetical and compositional matters: the dramatic model is influenced by the poetic one since Tamburlaine, as a character, is undermined by Marlowe as “Ovid sabotages his speaker with his words.” In a perceptive subpart, he develops how Zenocrate is given an “attractiveness superior to the eroticized female subjects of Ovid” (58), while “the playwright uses [her] to demonstrate Tamburlaine’s distinctive form of insensitivity just as Ovid heightens this tendency in the desultor most emphatically with Corinna as subject” (71). Linking these structural parallelisms by dint of in-depth textual analyses makes the case for a telling imitatio; in chapters 3, 4, and 5, “subtle Ovidian patterning in rhetoric and dramatic construction in Dido, Edward II, [and] Massacre” (32) is studied; thus Dido is read as homage to and parody of Virgil and Ovid through the role of the author undermining his speakers, the image of “prurient gazes,” and the interchanges between translations. Chapter 6 discusses sexuality in Hero and Leander to define the epyllion as a refashioning of “erotic elegy and its conventions” (184). Chapters 7 and 8 analyze Ovidian ironies in Doctor Faustus and The Jew of Malta.
This informative, carefully documented study fully engages with contemporary Marlovian scholarship to bring a fresh perspective to the field of Renaissance Ovidian studies and the role of translation, providing a vivid and thought-provoking book.
