M. L. Stapleton, Spenser’s Ovidian Poetics

33 It should be added that Elyot is not so generous to Ovid in the continuation of this comment, and suggests another Roman poet as a preferable influence: “by cause there is litell other lernyng in them concernyng either vertuous maners or policie I suppose it were better that as fables and ceremonies happen to come in a lesson it were declared abunda[n]tly by the maister than that in the saide two bokes a long tyme shulde be spente & almost lost: which mought be better employed on suche autors that do minister both eloquence ciuile policie and exhortation to vertue. . . . Wherfore in his place let vs bringe in Horace in whom is contayned moche varietie of lernynge and quickenesse of sentence.” See The Boke Named the Gouernour (London: Thomas Bertheletus, 1531), fol. 34r.

34 Spenser has also been accused of being prosodically monochromatic, most notably by C. S. Lewis: “There are, indeed, metrical variations, more numerous than we always remember. But the general effect is tranquil; line by line, unremarkable. His voice never breaks, he does not pluck you by the elbow, unexpected collocations of ideas do not pour out red hot. There is no irony or ambiguity.” See English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), 392. The last sentence seems particularly astonishing, given Lewis’s extraordinary critical powers and Spenser’s great subtlety. Contrast C. A. Patrides: “Spenser’s language is essentially distinguished by a polyvalency promoted by a rhythm at once ceremonious and ritualistic. Tension should not be sought because it will not be found, all frequent claims to the contrary notwithstanding. But the absence of tension is fully premeditated, the capital aim being a modulation in the sound patterns so as to suggest with extraordinary subtlety a diversity of emphases.” See “The Achievement of Edmund Spenser,” Yale Review 69 (1980): 437.

35 Jeremy Dimmick provides this information about Gower in “Ovid in the Middle Ages: Authority and Poetry,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, ed. Philip Hardie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 280-81. The Confessio Amantis draws heavily on the Metamorphoses, as well. Dimmick is indebted to A. G. Rigg, A History of Anglo-Latin Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

36 See Remarks, 152.

37 See “Spenser and Classical Traditions,” 226.

38 See “Ovid and the Professional Discourses of Scholarship, Religion, Rhetoric,” in Hardie, 68-69.

39 The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 22.

40 Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982); Pigman, “Imitation and the Renaissance Sense of the Past: The Reception of Erasmus’ Ciceronianus,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 9 (1979): 155-77, and “Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance,” Renaissance Quarterly 33 (1980): 1-32; McLaughlin, Literary Imitation in the Italian Renaissance: The Theory and Practice of Literary Imitation in Italy from Dante to Bembo (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); Conte, The Rhetoric of Imitation: Genre and Poetic Memory in Virgil and Other Latin Poets, trans. and ed. Charles Paul Segal (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986); Hinds, The Metamorphosis of Persephone (1987). Fletcher’s general comment on the early modern use of Ovid anticipates these scholars: “for the Renaissance theory of imitation is a highly refined theory of parody, taking that term in a broad and unsatiric sense” (The Prophetic Moment, 99). Greene provides a masterful if speculative overview of Spenser’s probable humanist education in his “antique world” entry in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. Hamilton et al., 43-44.

41 In Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), Bate provides a magisterial overview of Ovid’s probable use in the King’s New School in Stratford-upon-Avon (19-32); Burrow discusses similar ideas in “‘Full of the Maker’s Guile’: Ovid on Imitating Ovid and on the Imitation of Ovid” in Ovidian Transformations: Essays on the “Metamorphoses” and Its Reception, ed. Philip Hardie, Alessandro Barchiesi, and Stephen Hinds, Cambridge Philological Society Supplements 23 (Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society, 1999), 271-87; Enterline argues that the humanist program provided a performative-theatrical foundation for rhetorical imitatio, so that rhetoric and character would be indistinguishable. A student would learn best by “adopting the voices of others in order to find out one’s own” (25) as he appropriated Erasmus’s theory of self-discovery through identification with the text. Her especially thorough and historical analysis appears in The Rhetoric of the Body, 19-27.

42 See “Spenser’s Dialogic Voice in Book I of The Faerie Queene,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1800 41 (2001): 72; 71-84.

43 As Michael Holahan puts it, “The fate of Malbecco draws from and exhausts the entire Ovidian matrix.” See his entry “Ovid” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. Hamilton et al., 520. Roland Greene borrows the term “perspectivism” from Leo Spitzer’s Linguistics and Literary History: Essays in Stylistics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948) and felicitously applies it to Spenser. See “Spenser and Contemporary Vernacular Poetry” in The Cambridge Companion to Spenser, ed. Hadfield, 242.

44 Greene explains that in addition to the four exercises, masters introduced their pupils to “multiple translations of a single original (variae interpretationes) and . . . replies to it (responsa).” See The Light in Troy, 51.

45 See Thesaurus Linguae Romanae et Britanniae (London: Henry Wykes, 1565), s.v. aemulor. Ronald B. Bond thinks that this definition underlies all conceptions of envy in the Spenserian canon. See his “Invidia and the Allegory of Spenser’s Muiopotmos,” English Studies in Canada 2 (1976): 144-55.

46 See V 10: 6, 252, 443, 463, 474-75, 480-81.

47 All quotations and signature numbers from this text follow The scholemaster or plaine and perfite way of teachyng children, to vnderstand, write, and speake, the Latin tong but specially purposed for the priuate brynging vp of youth in ientlemen and noble mens houses, and commodious also for all such, as haue forgot the Latin tonge (London: John Daye, 1570).

48 Ascham’s remarks on rhyme and romance are well known: “In our forefathers tyme, when Papistrie, as a standyng poole, couered and ouerflowed all England, fewe bookes were read in our tong, sayuing certaine bookes of Cheualrie, as they sayd, for pastime and pleasure, which, as some say, were made in Monasteries, by idle Monkes or wanton Chanons: as one for example, Morte Arthure; the whole pleasure of which booke standeth in two speciall poyntes, in open mans slaughter and bold bawdrye” (27). Furthermore, “surelie to follow rather the Gothes in Rhyming than the Greekes in trew versifying were euen to eate ackornes with swyne, when we may freely eate wheate bread emonges men” (60). Spenser did not heed either critical pronouncement. Nor did he subscribe to Ascham’s notorious dislike of Italinate Englishmen, who “haue in more reuerence, the triumphes of Petrarche: than the Genesis of Moses” (28).

49 The Arte of English Poesie (London: Richard Field, 1589), 51.

50 E.g., Hulse, Metamorphic Verse; Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh; Enterline, The Rhetoric of the Body; Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid.

51 Although Baldwin does not dismiss the idea that Shakespeare read English translations of classical authors, his thesis depends on the opposite theory, that his Stratford education allowed him enough access to ancient languages to read the authors in their original tongues. See Shakspere’s Small Latine & Lesse Greeke, 2 vols. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944). The section devoted to Ovid is 2: 417-55. Baldwin’s master was Robert K. Root, whose Classical Mythology in Shakespeare (New York: Henry Holt, 1903), was his Yale dissertation (1902). More recent scholarship about humanist education includes Burrow, “Spenser and Classical Traditions,” in The Cambridge Companion to Spenser, ed. Hadfield, and “‘Full of the Maker’s Guile,’ in Ovidian Transformations, ed. Hardie, et al.; Richard Rambuss, “Spenser’s Lives, Spenser’s Careers,” in Spenser’s Life and the Subject of Biography, ed. Judith Anderson, Donald Cheney, and David A. Richardson (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 1-17; Richard C. Frushell, Edmund Spenser in the Early Eighteenth Century: Education, Imitation, and the Making of a Literary Model (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1999); Ann Moss, “Commonplace-Rhetoric and Thought-Patterns in Early Modern Culture,” in The Recovery of Rhetoric: Persuasive Discourse and Disciplinarity in the Human Sciences, ed. R. H. Roberts and J. M. M. Good (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 49-60.

52 Ascham does not recommend or condemn Ovid as a model for imitation, and mentions him only once in The scholemaster as an example of an ancient author whom Chaucer “and other Ientlemen” had been so foolish as to translate by means of “that barbarous and rude Rhyming”; they therefore resemble “the Gothians in handling of their verse” (60).

53 See Positions wherein those primitive circumstances be examined, which are necessarie for the training vp of children, either for skill in their booke, or health in their bodie (London: Thomas Vautrollier for Thomas Chare, 1581); The First Part of the Elementarie Which Entreateth Chiefly of the right writing of our English Tung (London: Thomas Vautroullier, 1582). Quotations and page numbers from the Elementarie are indicated in parentheses. Mulcaster, like Ascham, was something of a maverick, especially about matters such as phonetic spelling, physical education, “lowd singing,” and the importance of teaching “yong maides,” as well. Lewis provides an affectionate portrait of him as a benevolent disciplinarian in English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, 347-50.

54 Compare Ascham on double translation: “And for translating, vse you yourself, euery second or thyrd day, to chose out, some Epistle ad Atticum, some notable common place out of his Orations, or some other part of Tullie, by your discretion, which your scholer may not know where to finde: and translate it you your selfe, into plaine naturall English, and then giue it to him to translate into Latin againe: allowing him good space and tyme to do it, both with diligent heede, and good aduisement. . . . Whan he bringeth it translated vnto you, bring you forth the place of Tullie: lay them together: compare the one with the other: commend his good choice, & right placing of wordes: shew his faultes iently, but blame them not ouer sharply: for, of such missings, iently admonished of, procedeth glad & good heed taking” (The scholemaster, 31-31v). Ascham claims to have found the impetus for the pedagogy in Pliny (34v), and was somewhat wary of paraphrase, preferring metaphrase, word-for-word translation.

John Brinsley’s preface to his Ouids Metamorphosis translated Grammatically, and also according to the propriety of our English tongue, so far as Grammar and the verse will well beare (London: Printed by Humfrey Lownes for Thomas Man, 1618) provides in a few short pages a model of the type of humanist schoolroom that may well have resembled Mulcaster’s a half century before. Learning Latin, at least with Ovid as a text, was supposed to be a collaborative, heuristical, and peer-oriented experience, with the master using “one of the two Seniors of the forme” to assist him in giving the class “some light and vnderstanding of the meaning of” the text. Further advice “To the painefull Schoolemaster, desirous to reape the fruits of his labours” suggests that said schoolmaster “cause each to study and make their lectures perfect by the help of the translation and their Grammar, to be able, so soone as they should be called to say, First, to deliuer the English, secondly, the Latine both in prose and verse, viz. first, in a pure Latine stile in prose, and then turning that into the Poets verse, Which practice will be both a good helpe for making Latine, and also a most plaine way to enter them in making a verse. And afterwards to be able to construe and parse without booke, rendering a reason of euery thing; to giue the phrases, to vary them, and to doe whatsoeuer the translation directs vnto. Then let them doe in all the Authors thus translated, so farre as the Author and translation afford them helpe” (see ¶3a, ¶3av-A). Here, Ascham’s double translation meets reciprocal grammar—the training in logic and in the art of memory must also have been useful training for a burgeoning poet. The interpenetration of the use of translation, the art of original poetical composition, and imitation of the poet one translates should also not be missed.

55Ascham is somewhat more xenophobic. He decries “Stoickes, Anabaptists, and Friers: with Epicures, Libertines and Monkes,” who are as “pernicious in their opinions” as they are “rude and barbarous in their writings” (The scholemaster, 46).

56 See “Spenser’s Life and Career,” in The Cambridge Companion to Spenser, ed. Andrew Hadfield, 16-18.

57 See “Spenser and Classical Traditions,” 220.

58 Edmund Spenser in the Early Eighteenth Century, 26.

59 (London: Wynkin de Worde, 1513). Signature numbers refer to this edition.

60 See Ralph Hexter, Ovid and Medieval Schooling: Studies in Medieval School Commentaries on Ovid’s “Ars amatoria,” “Epistulae ex Ponto,” and “Epistulum heroidum” (Munich: Arbeo Gesellschaft, 1986), 137-204.

61 “Pectoribus mores tot sunt, quot in ore figurae; / Qui sapit, innumeris moribus aptus erit” (AA 1.759-60). All references to the Ars and all subsequent prose translations are taken from The Art of Love and Other Poems, tr. J. H. Mozley, 2^nd. ed. tr. G. P. Goold (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985).

62 See Tristia 2.207-546, which Ovid addresses to his emperor who banished him, a self-defense against charges of immorality associated with the Ars. Spenser’s fellow sojourner in Ireland, Thomas Churchyard, translates its first three books. As I argue in Chapter 1, Spenser demonstrates his knowledge of and sympathy with passages from Ovid’s exile poetry throughout his own career, e.g., “Anew reuenging paynes I feele for auncient written Art, / The persecution differeth far from time of my desart” (TFB 17v).

63 Hulse observes that from the incunabulae to the middle of the sixteenth century, only the Aldine Ovid (1502) prints the original Latin text without any moralizing commentary (245-47). For Wallace, see his “Placement, Gender, Pedagogy: Vergil’s Fourth Georgic in Print,” Renaissance Quarterly 56 (2003): 377-407; “Reading the 1590 Faerie Queene with Thomas Nashe,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 38.2 (2005): 35-50; “Virgil and Bacon in the Schoolroom,” English Literary History 73 (2006): 161-85.

64 See Allen, Mysteriously Meant: The Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical Interpretation in the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), 6-8, 11, and 137. In commentary on Genesis 30.9-11, Luther says: “allegory is like a beautiful harlot who fondles men in such a way that it is impossible for her not to be loved, especially by idle men who are free from a trial. Men of this kind think that they are in the middle of Paradise and on God’s lap whenever they indulge in such speculations. At first allegories originated from stupid and idle monks. Finally they spread so widely that some men turned Ovid’s Metamorphoses into allegories. They made a laurel tree Mary, and Apollo they made Christ” (quoted in Allen, 240). Rabelais: “Croiez vous en vostre foy qu’oncques Homere, escrivent l’Iliade et Odyssée, pensast es allegories lesquelles de luy ont calfreté Plutrache, Heraclides Ponticq, Eustatie, Phornute, et ce que d’iceulx Politian a desrobé? Si le croiez, vous n’approachez ne de pieds ne de mains à mon opinion, qui decrete icelles aussi peu avoir esté songées d’Homere que d’Ovide en ses Metamorphoses les sacremens de l’Evangile, lesquelz un Frere Lubin, vray croque lardon, s’est efforcé demonstrer, si d’adventure il rencontroit gens aussi folz que luy, et (comme dict le proverbe) couvercle digne du chaudron” [But do you faithfully believe that Homer, in writing his Iliad and Odyssey, ever had in mind the allegories squeezed out of him by Plutarch, Heraclides Ponticus, Eustathius, and Phornutus, and which Politian afterwards stole from them in his turn? If you do, you are not within a hand’s or a foot’s length of my opinion. For I believe them to have been as little dreamed of by Homer as the Gospel mysteries were by Ovid in his Metamorphoses; a case which a certain Friar Lubin, a true bacon-picker, has actually tried to prove, in the hope that he may meet others as crazy as himself and—as the proverb says—a lid to fit his kettle]. The text is La Vie Tres Horrificque du Grand Gargantua, ed. V. L. Saulnier and Jean-Yves Pouilloux (Paris: Flammarion, 1968), 45; the translation, Gargantua and Pantagruel, tr. J. M. Cohen (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1955; rpt. 1983), 38-39.

65 There are many accounts of this phenomenon. The foregoing material is based on some of these, such as Allen (135-39); Hulse (passim, but especially 244-50); and Barkan (94-136). One of the best is Lester K. Born, “Ovid and Allegory,” Speculum 9 (1934): 362-79.

66 See Joel C. Relihan, “Ovid Metamorphoses I.1-4 and Fulgentius’ Mitologiae,” American Journal of Philology 105 (1984): 87-90.

67 Katherine O. Elliot and J. P. Elder, “A Critical Edition of the Vatican Mythographers,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 78 (1947): 189-207; Barkan, 124.

68 For this material, including accounts of Bersuire and the differences between the Moralisé and the Ovidius moralizatus, see Allen (168-73) and Hulse (240-50). Some scholars mistakenly attribute the Moralisé to Bersuire or otherwise conflate the two texts.

69 See A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave, A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, & Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad 1475-1640, 3 vols., 2nd. ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1974-91), 2: 201-03.

70 Upton (2:371) notes Spenser’s use of “griple” (FQ 1.4.21), its root probably OE gripan (to grip, tenaciously), and mentions Golding’s very similar “bird[e], which yet [of golde] is gripple still” (XVB 7.599; Met. 7.466).

71 The Arte of English Poesie, 49. For a brief biography of Golding see DNB 22:75. Lewis’s patronizing comments: “the indulgence which more than one writer has extended to his ugly fourteeners demands some explanation. . . . The Ovidian manner, the flippant and sophisticated brilliance, was beyond his reach as it was beyond the reach of all the Drab Age poets. But in the Metamorphoses this manner surprisingly coexists with an unspoiled and hearty relish in sheer story-telling; it is puff-pastry (the finest ever cooked) but puff-pastry enclosing a homely and nourishing food” (English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, 251).

72 For some notable exceptions, see Anthony Brian Taylor’s notes on Spenser’s use of Golding in note 17 above. See also Lee T. Pearcy, The Mediated Muse: English Translations of Ovid, 1560-1700 (Hamden, Ct.: Archon Books, 1984); and Raphael Lyne, “Golding’s Englished Metamorphoses,” Translation and Literature 5 (1996): 183-200, and Ovid’s Changing Worlds: English Metamorphoses 1567-1632 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

73 Poliziano (1454-94) and Scaliger (1453-1558) were well known as humanists, editors, controversialists, and champions of classical literature. The poems are given the titles “ANGELI POLITIANI EPIGRAMMATA DE EXSVLIO ET MORTE OVIDII” and “DE EODEM CARMEN IVLII Cæsaris Scaligeri. Loquitur ipse Ouidius ad Augustum” [Angelo Poliziano’s epigram on the exile and death of Ovid; Julius Caesar Scaliger’s poem on the same subject. Ovid himself speaks to Augustus]. The Latin text used here is P. Ouidii Nasonis Fastorum lib. VI; Tristium lib. V; De ponto lib. IIII; In ibim; Ad liuiam quid in singulis præstitum sit, ex sequent pagina intelliges (London: Thomas Vautrollier, 1583), 5-7. Saltonstall’s translation of his predecessors into pentameter couplets is taken from Ouids Tristia containinge fiue bookes of mournfull elegies which hee sweetly composed in the midst of his aduersitie, while hee liu’d in Tomos a cittie of Pontus where hee dyed after seauen yeares banishment from Rome. Translated into English by W. S. (London: Printed by Thomas and Richard Cotes for Fra: Groue, 1633), A4v-A5.

74 See “Ovid,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. Hamilton et al., 522.