Interweaving myths in Shakespeare and his contemporaries

Janice Valls-Russell, Agnes Lafont, Charlotte Coffin, Janice Valls-Russell, Agnès Lafont, Charlotte Coffin

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781526117687
• eBook ISBN: 9781526117717
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

This volume proposes new insights into the uses of classical mythology by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, focusing on interweaving processes in early modern appropriations of myth. Its 11 essays show how early modern writing intertwines diverse myths and plays with variant versions of individual myths that derive from multiple classical sources, as well as medieval, Tudor and early modern retellings and translations. Works discussed include poems and plays by William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe and others. Essays concentrate on specific plays including The Merchant of Venice and Dido Queen of Carthage, tracing interactions between myths, chronicles, the Bible and contemporary genres. Mythological figures are considered to demonstrate how the weaving together of sources deconstructs gendered representations. New meanings emerge from these readings, which open up methodological perspectives on multi-textuality, artistic appropriation and cultural hybridity.

1

Shakespeare’s mythological feuilletage: A methodological induction

Yves Peyré

When Roland Barthes compared a literary text to ‘pâte feuilletée’¹ – pastry that puffs up into myriads of light, flaky, crisp layers, with multiple bubbles in the baked dough – he was not only reasserting what he called elsewhere ‘la jouissance du texte’ (the blissful experience of the text),² he was also defining the literary text as consisting of multiple layers branching off around countless interstices and alveoli, in opposition to what Maurice Blanchot had denounced as the totalitarian tendencies of a ‘parole continue, sans intermittence et sans vide’ (‘a speech that is continuous, without intermittence and without blanks’).³ Turning his gaze far upstream, away from the literature of the 1960s and 1970s, Barthes might have taken as archetypal of such feuilletage, or multi-layering, the intertextual practices of classical antiquity. Just as Virgil’s Aeneid constantly refers back to the Odyssey and the Iliad, through points of contact with, and departure from, Homeric epics, Ovid playfully invites Virgil and Seneca, as well as Homer, both directly and through Virgil, into his own compositions. Statius grounds his own creativity in Virgil, Ovid, Propertius and Catullus. Such texts can be best enjoyed not only when considered as independent, individual, autonomous creations in their own right, but, simultaneously, as belonging, each in its way, to a collective textual labyrinth: not an imprisoning one but an open, expanding structure, where all the pleasure consists in endlessly exploring back and forth, prospectively and retrospectively, blind alleys, nooks and corners, open vistas, as well as false perspectives, side-lanes and twisting paths. When Shakespeare plays host to Ovid, he is not inviting Ovid alone into his text, he is also welcoming in Ovid reading Virgil, himself reading Homer, with all the depth, freedom and delicious lightness this multi-layering engenders, as each text leaves a trace in the others, introducing an enriching leaven that expands the text.

An example of such multi-foliation may be found in the passage in Ovid where Salmacis approaches Hermaphroditus: the innocent boy blushes, his cheeks take on the same colour as apples hanging from the tree in the sun: ‘hic color aprica pendentibus arbore pomis’ (Metamorphoses, IV, 331). The comparison implicitly connects Hermaphroditus’s story with Narcissus’s despair in the preceding book. Enamoured of his own feminine beauty, with its mixture of blush and snowy white (‘in niveo mixtum candore ruborem’, III, 423), and frustrated not to be able to clasp his own reflection, the youth beats his bare breast: the blows colour his skin with the rosy glow of pain, ‘roseum … ruborem’ (III, 482) that ironically mirrors the rubor on his cheeks and looks ‘non aliter quam poma solent, quae candida parte, / parte rubent’ (none other than apples do, part of which stays white, / while the other part reddens) (III, 483–4). In the stories of Hermaphroditus and Narcissus the reddening fruit expresses opposite facets of suffering and desire: Hermaphroditus’s shyness as he vainly tries to avoid Salmacis’s enterprising importunity; Narcissus’s craving for what deludes and escapes him, and his ensuing anguished frustration. It is as if the game consisted in suggesting an underlying convergence between situations that seem to differ widely. The reverberations that Ovid’s blushing apples create between the plight of Narcissus and that of Hermaphroditus are all the more powerful insofar as the intratextual echo within the Metamorphoses is reinforced by an intertextual reference to Sappho’s poetry, where the apple reddening in the sun at the top of the tree, both coveted and out of reach, belongs to what is probably the remnant of a lost epithalamium; the fragmentary nature of this reference to a newly wedded bride⁴ makes it indeterminate, wavering between promise and loss.⁵ This uncertainty becomes ambivalence when the image is transferred from girl to boy as it passes from Sappho’s epithalamium to Tibullus’s Elegies, where it characterises Apollo’s androgynous beauty, his snow-white skin tinged with a purple glow (‘color in niveo colore purpureus’, IV, iii, 30), an archetypal mixture of ‘niveus’ and ‘purpureus’ that makes him look ‘ut juveni primum virgo deducta marito / inficitur teneras ore rubente genas / et cum contexunt amarantis alba puellae / lilia et autumno candida mala rubent’ (like a newly wed virgin, her tender cheeks suffused with red, as when girls mix up lilies and amaranth, or when white apples grow red in autumn) (IV.iii.31–4). Through multiple transfers among Sappho, Theocritus⁶ and Tibullus, the image naturally became a vector of mobile, fluctuating ambiguity, not only in Ovid’s poetry, but also in Seneca’s Medea, where the epithalamium in honour of Creusa describes the young bride reddening like snowy white steeped into blood-coloured dye⁷ – not altogether without foreboding, since Creusa’s modest blush is the harbinger of Medea’s ‘genae rubentes’ (858), her reddening cheeks flushed in hatred and lusting for revenge.

Considered not as separate, independent images but as a coherent and logically connected poetic nexus, or as interdependent facets of the poetic imagination, the blushing apples in Sappho’s fragment and in Tibullus’s, Ovid’s and Seneca’s reworkings explore the nature of intertextual difference and consonance in relation to the problematic articulation of questionable opposites; these contradictions, which intertextuality both underlines and undermines, emphasise frustration and accomplishment, desire and fear, pain and pleasure. This, however, is but a small part of a wider process that opens onto further contradictions, as between the gender issues of masculinity and femininity suggested by Tibullus and Ovid, which are connected with generic differentiations, or between the epic and the erotic, or elegy and tragedy.

The gap seems unbridgeable. On the one hand, there is the temptation of delicious fruit blushing in the sun, superimposed onto blood rushing to the face as a result of different types of emotion; on the other, there is the blood that flows from a wounded, tortured, mangled body. Yet that is the leap, barely hinted at in Seneca’s Medea, that Shakespeare might invite us to take in Titus Andronicus. It is a commonplace of criticism that the name of Lavinia comes from Virgil’s Aeneid. As early as 1943, Robert Adger Law pointed out that Titus’s consent to the marriage of his daughter Lavinia to the newly made Emperor Saturninus – even though she was already betrothed to Bassianus – recalls the plight of Virgil’s Lavinia, ‘who like Shakespeare’s heroine, is promised by her father Latinus to Aeneas despite previous betrothal to King Turnus’.⁸ Structurally, the link between the two situations combines symmetry and inversion. Aeneas has to take Lavinia from Turnus to fulfil the Fates’ prediction that her union with a stranger (Aeneas) is a necessary step towards the foundation of Rome; when Saturninus takes Lavinia from Bassianus, who takes her back from him, this tug-of-war is one of the first signs that the empire founded by Aeneas has become ‘a wilderness of tigers’ (III.i.54) whose savagery vies with the barbarity of the Goths. Rather than dwell on the parallel predicaments of the two Lavinias, recent criticism has focused on Virgil’s poetical evocation of Aeneas’s promised wife. When she hears her mother beg Turnus not to fight Aeneas, Lavinia blushes:

accipit vocem lacrimis Lavinia matris

flagrantis perfusa genas, cui plurimus ignem

subiecit rubor et calefacta per ora cucurrit.

indum sanguineo veluti violaverit ostro

si quis ebur, aut mixta rubent ubi lilia multa

alba rosa, talis virgo dabat ore colores.

(Virgil, Aeneid, XII, 64–9)

Lavinia took in her mother’s voice with burning tears bathing her cheeks, where an intense glow sent fire spreading on her burning face. As when one gives a violet colour to Indian ivory with blood-red purple, or as white lilies redden, when mixed with many roses, such colours the maiden’s face showed.

Is it because she suffers at her parents’ anguish, or is she is in love with Aeneas as some readers claim, or with Turnus as others assert? Is she in love at all? It is the nature of blushes to be open to interpretation, and Lavinia’s blushing is the public expression of some violent emotion that, being voiceless, remains forever private. As Oliver Lyne has suggested, Virgil’s vocabulary lends itself to double entendre and accompanies the epic voice with what he has called ‘further voices’.⁹ What attracts attention here, beyond the parallel with Tibullus’s phrasing, is Virgil’s original use of the verb violare. Considering the context, the verb, understandably, is often interpreted as meaning ‘to alter the colour and give a purple hue, like that of a violet’; the verb violare also applies to the staining of an altar with the blood of sacrifice.¹⁰ To detect such a subtext to Lavinia’s blush would link the marriage that is imposed upon her with the marriage that Dido was denied, and designate her as one more victim in terms of feminine suffering, through a connection with Virgil’s description of the mortally wounded warrior maid Camilla, whose ‘virgineus cruor’ (virgin blood) (Aeneid, XI, 804) has sometimes been viewed as superimposing a suggestion of defloration on the image of death.¹¹

Ambrogio Calepino’s Dictionarium defined violo as ‘corrumpo, polluo, et quasi vim infero, quod propriè de virgine dicitur’ (to soil, to defile, and so to say, to use force, said, strictly speaking, about a virgin).¹² John Florio’s definition of the Italian word violare, with meanings modelled on those of the Latin, was ‘to force, to ravish, to pollute, to defile, to marre, to spoil, to rape, to violate, to corrupt, to make fowle, to deflowre, to distaine, to hurt, to misuse, to wrong, to infringe, to do against, to transgress, as a man doth a law’ – and, almost as an afterthought – ‘Also, to adorn with violets, to dye violet’.¹³ When confronted with the network constituted by the words ‘violaverit’, ‘sanguineo’ and ‘virgo’, Florio’s definition, with its contiguity of brutality and delicacy, may suggest some hint of violence in the subtle texture of Virgil’s poetry, which elsewhere associates the verb violare with the breach of integrity caused by a wound on a warrior’s body¹⁴ – what Thomas Cooper’s Thesaurus (1565) referred to as ‘corpus vulnere violare: to wound’.¹⁵Thus the combination of Senecan horror and Ovidian detachment that is prominent in Titus Andronicus is fused, as has been argued, with elegant Virgilian ambivalence.¹⁶ One cannot rule out, of course, that we are reading Virgil’s description of Lavinia’s blush in the light of Shakespeare’s treatment of her namesake in Titus Andronicus, thus projecting Shakespeare onto Virgil in what amounts to backward or retrospective interpretation. At the same time, in the Aeneid, Lavinia’s blush itself sends one back, in the substructures of its literary construction, not only to the glowing beauty of Tibullus’s effeminate Apollo, but also, simultaneously, to Homer’s Iliad (IV, 141–2), where the image of ivory coloured in purple by Maionian or Karian women refers to the wound Menelaus received in battle...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword/Forward: Mnemosyne – Ruth Morse
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: ‘Ariachne’s broken woof’
• 1 Shakespeare’s mythological feuilletage: A methodological induction
• 2 The non-Ovidian Elizabethan epyllion: Thomas Watson, Christopher Marlowe, Richard Barnfield
• 3 ‘This realm is an empire’: Tales of origins in medieval and early modern France and England
• 4 Trojan shadows in Shakespeare’s King John
• 5 Venetian Jasons, parti-coloured lambs and a tainted wether: Ovine tropes and the Golden Fleece in The Merchant of Venice
• 6 Fifty ways to kill your brother: Medea and the poetics of fratricide in early modern English literature
• 7 ‘She, whom Jove transported into Crete’: Europa, between consent and rape
• 8 Subtle weavers, mythological interweavings and feminine political agency: Penelope and Arachne in early modern drama
• 9 Multi-layered conversations in Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage
• 10 Burlesque or neoplatonic? Popular or elite?: The shifting value of classical mythology in Love’s Mistress
• 11 Pygmalion, once and future myth: Instead of a conclusion
• Select bibliography
• Index