Bibliofictions: Ovidian Heroines and the Tudor Book

292 Pages·2009·4.068 MB·English

by  Lindsay Ann Reid

BIBLIOFICTIONS: OVIDIAN HEROINES AND THE TUDOR BOOK

by

Lindsay Ann Reid

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Graduate Department of English
University of Toronto

© Copyright by Lindsay Ann Reid (2009)
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ABSTRACT

―Bibliofictions: Ovidian Heroines and the Tudor Book‖
Lindsay Ann Reid
Doctor of Philosophy, 2009
Graduate Department of English, University of Toronto

This dissertation explores how the mythological heroines from Ovid‘s Heroides and
Metamorphoses were catalogued, conflated, reconceived, and recontextualized in vernacular
literature; in so doing, it joins considerations of voice, authority, and gender with reflections on
Tudor technologies of textual reproduction and ideas about the book. In the late medieval and
Renaissance eras, Ovid‘s poetry stimulated the imaginations of authors ranging from Geoffrey
Chaucer and John Gower to Isabella Whitney, William Shakespeare, and Michael Drayton.
Ovid‘s characteristic bookishness—his interest in textual revision and his thematization of the
physicality and malleability of art in its physical environments—was not lost upon these
postclassical interpreters who engaged with his polysemous cast of female characters. His
numerous English protégés replicated and expanded Ovid‘s metatextual concerns by reading
and rewriting his metamorphic poetry in light of the metaphors through which they
understood both established networks of scribal dissemination and emergent modes of printed
book production.
My study of Greco-Roman tradition and English ―bibliofictions‖ (or fictive
representations of books, their life cycles, and the communication circuits in which they
operate) melds literary analysis with the theoretical concerns of book history by focusing on
intersections and interactions between physical, metaphorical, and imaginary books. I posit the
Tudor book as a site of complex cultural and literary negotiations between real and inscribed,
historical and fictional readers, editors, commentators, and authors, and, as my discussion
ii
unfolds, I combine bibliographical, historical, and literary perspectives as a means to
understanding both the reception of Ovidian poetry in English literature and Ovid‘s place in
the history of books. This dissertation thus contributes to a growing body of book history
criticism while also modeling a bibliographically enriched approach to the study of late
medieval and Renaissance intertextuality.

iii
CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
Ovidian Bibliofictions and Tudor Books 1

‗IF ALL THE YEARTH WER PARCHMENT SCRIBABLE‘
Ovidian Heroines in the Querelle des Femmes 50

‗HIR NAME, ALLAS! IS PUBLISSHED SO WYDE‘
Fama, Gossip, and the Publication of Cressida 97

‗BOTH FALSE AND ALSO TRUE‘
Epistolary Elegy and Fictionalized Materiality 150

‗OUR SAINTED LEGENDARIE‘
The Anglo-Ovidian Heroines 199

APPENDIX
Latin Editions of Ovid in Tudor England 250

Early Printed Materials Consulted 261

Bibliography 264

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
It is a pleasure to thank those who made this dissertation possible. First and foremost, I
would like to offer my gratitude to my doctoral supervisor, Elizabeth D. Harvey. I have
benefitted enormously from her guidance and encouragement at all stages of my PhD. I am
also grateful to Alexandra Gillespie and David Galbraith, the members of my committee, for
their expertise and feedback as I researched and prepared my dissertation.
I am grateful to a number of institutions for their generous funding. I owe particular thanks
to the Ontario Graduate Scholarship Program and to Mr. Glenn Carter, the donor who
funded my fellowship in 2007-2008. In addition, the financial assistance I have received from
the University of Toronto in the form of numerous Open Fellowships has been greatly
appreciated.
Finally, I offer my regards to all my friends and family members who supported me during
the completion of my doctoral project. Special thanks to Kris Meen, Heather Ladd, and
Janet Reid for the time that they invested in helping me to proofread.

v
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

STC Pollard, A.W. and Redgrave, G.R. A Short Title Catalogue of Books Printed in
England, Scotland and Ireland, 1475-1640. 2nd ed. 3 vols. Rev. W.A.
Jackson, F.S. Ferguson, and Katharine F. Pantzer. Bibliographical Society,
1986-91.

ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2004.
<http://www.oxforddnb.com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/subscribed/>.

A NOTE ON TEXTS

Motivated by desires to reflect material historicity, I have avoided modernizing
orthography and retained original spellings in my transcriptions of early
materials. I have not ―corrected‖ i/j or u/v; modernized archaic characters
(e.g. Þ or Ȝ); expanded abbreviations (e.g. yt); or changed virgules (/) to
commas. I have, however, regularized all instances of long s (ſ) in both early
printed materials and modern reprints of medieval and Renaissance texts. I
have also taken the liberty of capitalizing the titles of fifteenth and sixteenth-
century materials.
Because I have opted to retain virgules, I have used vertical bars (|) rather than
front slashes (/) to indicate line breaks when citing poetry.
vi
Thenne it is a gret thynge to hym that secheth to know thentendement of Ovyde and he ought
tendyne & sette hys hye corage to contynuel estudye & to take payne & dilygence to rumyne
and chewe hys cudde and enquyre that the sayde poete hath devysed and dysputed of natures
or of maners and of gestes.
–William Caxton, Ovyde Hys Booke of Methamorphose (c. 1480)

vii
1

INTRODUCTION:
OVIDIAN BIBLIOFICTIONS AND TUDOR BOOKS

In Book 2 of Ovid‘s Ars Amatoria, a mock-didactic collection of elegies, the self-
proclaimed ―praeceptor Amoris‖ [teacher of Love] retells the Homeric story of Ulysses and
Calypso in Ogygia.1 Playfully instructing his male readers in the arts of seduction and romantic
conquest, Ovid recommends that these men, like Ulysses, employ rhetoric to charm their
mistresses. Conveniently glossing over the fact that Ulysses is more often remembered as the
unwilling prisoner than as the active wooer of the persistent Nereid, Ovid posits the Ithacan as
an example of a suitor who, though he was not ―formosus‖ [comely], was ―facundus‖ [eloquent]
and achieved amatory success through verbal prowess (2.123). 2 Ovid relates that ―iterumque
iterumque‖ [again and again] Calypso implored Ulysses to tell her the story of the Trojan War
(2.127). In response, ―Ille referre aliter saepe solebat idem‖ [often would he tell the same story in
other words] (2.128):
Ille levi virga (virgam nam forte tenebat)
Quod rogat, in spisso litore pingit opus.
„Haec‟ inquit „Troia est‟ (muros in litore fecit):
„Hic tibi sit Simois; haec mea castra puta.
Campus erat‟ (campumque facit), „quem caede Dolonis
Sparsimus, Haemonios dum vigil optat equos.
Illic Sithonii fuerant tentoria Rhesi:
Hac ego sum captis nocte revectus equis.‟
Pluraque pingebat, subitus cum Pergama fluctus
Abstulit et Rhesi cum duce castra suo.
(2.129-40)

1 I cite the text of The Art of Love from The Art of Love and Other Poems, Loeb Classical Library 232, 2nd ed.,
trans. J.H. Mozley, rev. G.P Goold (1979; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 1.17. Subsequent
parenthetical book and line numbers for the Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris refer to this edition, and
English translations have been adopted or closely adapted from this same source unless otherwise noted.
2 As Steven J. Green points out, the dynamics of this episode are ―immediately problematized by the fact
that Ulysses actually wants to leave: The reader has to work hard for a lesson here: if we are being taught the
merits of good speaking, are we meant to follow the example of Ulysses (who entrances his girl with his
speaking) or Calypso (who manages to detain her lover with her own rhetorical powers)?‖: ―Lessons in Love:
Fifty Years of Scholarship on Ovid‘s Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris,‖ in The Art of Love: Bimillennial Essays
on Ovid‟s Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris, eds. Roy Gibson, Steven Green, and Alison Sharrock (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2006), 17-18.
2

He with a light staff (for by chance he carried a staff) draws in the deep sand the story
of which she asks. ‗Here,‘ says he ‗is Troy‘ (he made walls upon the beach), ‗and here,
suppose, is Simois; imagine this to be my camp. There was a plain‘ (and he draws a
plain) ‗which we sprinkled with Dolon‘s blood, while he watched and yearned for the
Haemonian steeds. There were the tents of Sithonian Rhesus; on that night I rode back
on the captured horses.‘ More was he portraying when a sudden wave washed
Pergamus away, and the camp of Rhesus with its chief.

As Edmund Spenser—writing ―One day I wrote her name upon the strand, │ But
came the waves and washéd it away‖—would recognize nearly sixteen hundred years later, this
Ovidian image of the aggressive tide with its ability to ―pray‖ on Ulysses‘ ciphers is potent.3
Like Amoretti 75, Ovid‘s digression in Ars Amatoria 2 reflects the ephemeral nature of written
record, and Ulysses‘ pseudo-Homeric story in the sand raises doubts about the stability of
script and the physical manifestations of poetic substance. The written word is both fragile and
subject to mutation. Despite poetry‘s tantalizing promises to ―eternize‖ its subject matter,
poetic substance will invariably ―dy in dust‖ if it is not reiterated in successive forms, inscribed
iterumque iterumque, or, as Spenser would phrase it, written ―with a second hand.‖4
Even as it thematizes the material fragility of text and the inherent instability of written
artifacts, this Ovidian interlude in Ars Amatoria 2 also points to the paradoxical and immaterial
durability of particular fictions. Despite literature‘s dependence upon tenuous material chains of
transmission for survival through time, both the poetic substance of the literary text and the
idea of the text itself transcend any one inscription. Literature, then, exists simultaneously in
the physical world and in the supraliminal realm of imagination. In narratological terms, we can
discern the separation of the enduring ―story‖ of the Trojan War from the vagaries of
―narrative discourse‖ and the particularities of its physical transmission.5 When Ulysses

3 I cite the text of the Amoretti from Edmund Spenser‟s Poetry, 3rd ed., eds. Hugh Maclean and Anne Lake
Prescott (1968; New York: Norton, 1993), 75.1-2, 4. Raphael Lyne also points to connections between Ars
Amatoria 2 and Amoretti 75 in Ovid‟s Changing Worlds: English Metamorphoses, 1567-1632 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001), 94-95.
4 Amoretti, 75.11, 10, 3.
5 H. Porter Abbott defines ―narrative discourse‖ as ―the story as narrated,‖ explaining: ―the distinction
between ‗story‘ and ‗story as narrated‘ can be taken to imply that stories exist independently of narrative
presentation—in other words, the same story can be narrated in more than one way‖: The Cambridge
Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 193.