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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 January 2019
The phrase ‘Ovidian poetry’ or sometimes ‘mythological poetry’ is commonly used to denote a group of English poems written in the manner of Ovid during the 1590s and thereafter. Most importandy the group includes Lodge's Glaucus and Scilla (1589), Marlowe's Hero and Leander (1593), Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis (1593), T. H.'s Œnone and Paris (1594), Drayton's Endimion and Phoebe (1595), Thomas Edwards’ Cephalus and Procris and Narcissus (1595). All the poems recast, or rather amplify, myths from Ovid and other classical writers; all treat a love story, usually with that precious combination of sensuality and sentiment for which Ovid is famous; all are highly ornate, employing rhetorically worked up love arguments, rich descriptions of clothing, buildings, tapestries, and the like, and minor embellishing myths like that of Neptune trying to embrace Leander in Marlowe's poem.
Read at the Central Renaissance Conference at St. Louis 22 March 1958
1 On this subject see Smith, Hallett, Elizabethan Poetry (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), pp. 64–74 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Bush, Douglas, Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition (Minneapolis, 1932), pp. 72–73 Google Scholar; Zocca, Louis R., Elizabethan Narrative Poetry (New Brunswick, N. J., 1950), p. 195 Google Scholar.
3 Bush, p. 83; Smith p. 75.
4 In Christopher Marlowe in London (Cambridge, Mass., 1934).
6 My references are to Amyntas Thomce Watsonx (London, 1585) and to The Lamentations of Amyntas for the death of Phillis, tr. Abraham Fraunce (London, 1587).
7 Bradner, Leicester, Musae Anglicanae (New York, 1940), p. 46 Google Scholar. ‘ The Works of Thomas Lodge (Hunterian Club, Glasgow, 1883), I, 10. The name ‘Amyntas’ was generally understood to refer to Watson; for a discussion of a similar reference by Spenser in 1590, see Rangier, William, ‘Spenser and Thomas Watson’, MLN LXIX (1954). 484–487 Google Scholar.
8 In Christopher Marlowe in London.
9 See Chambers, E. K., William Shakespeare (Oxford, 1930), II, 193 Google Scholar.
10 There are some, however, that are closer than those that have been cited between Venus and Adonis and Glaucus and Scilla; see New Variorum Shakespeare: the Poems, ed. H. E. Rollins (Philadelphia, 1938), pp. 395-398.
11 My references are to the edition by Joseph Quincy Adams (Washington, 1943).
12 Adams compares Lyly, Euphues (ed. Arber, p. 93), ‘Loue knoweth no lawes’; but Watson's form is closer. Fraunce translates Watson's line, ‘Loue can abide no law, loue alwaies lou[e]s to be lawles’ (B4V).
13 Watson's own source for this, as doubtless T. H. was aware, was Virgil's Eclogues (Loeb ed., p. 36): ‘Postquam te fata tulerunt, | ipsa Pales agros atque ipse reliquit Apollo’.
14 Fraunce (AIr) translates Watson's passage:
15 Watson is here adapting Virgil (Æneid IV, 68-73):
But the source of the passage in Œnone and Paris is clearly Fraunce's translation of Watson, which runs (DIr):