Stony ladies

In moving from The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image to its near contemporary, The Rape of Lucrece, we are turning our attention to another Elizabethan epyllion in which Ovid's embodied voices are integral to a critique of the unspoken assumptions behind Petrarchan convention. But there are profound differences between the way Marston and Shakespeare juxtapose Ovidian and Petrarchan rhetoric. A sense of these will allow us a better grasp of the local, contemporary inflections that shape the sexual politics of The Rape of Lucrece. And it is, of course, precisely the sexual politics of Lucrece that have been the subject of much debate: critics have argued, in various ways, that the deeply entangled issues of rape, subjectivity, and rhetoric in Shakespeare's epyllion pose particularly vexing problems for readers, problems that call upon both critical and ethical judgment. The map one draws of Lucrece's literary affiliations and context will therefore be a matter of no small importance, particularly since the issues that most trouble the poem's recent readers – rhetoric, rape, subjectivity, and the female voice – are, as we have seen, central to the Ovidian legacy that informs it. But before we can analyze how Shakespeare engages with this longer legacy in the voice of his Lucrece, or what difference his revisions make to our reading of the poem's sexual politics, it will be helpful first to narrow the focus briefly by comparing the symbolic and libidinal economy of The Rape of Lucrece to that of Marston's epyllion.

Between Leontes' opening imperative, “Tongue-tied our queen? Speak you” (1.2.28) and the final act, where Hermione as living statue returns to her husband yet says nothing directly to him, The Winter's Tale traces a complex, fascinated, and uneasy relation to female speech. A play much noted for interrogating the “myriad forms of human narration” – old tales, reports, ballads, oracles – The Winter's Tale begins its investigation of language when Hermione tellingly jests to Polixenes:

Leontes' swift turn to suspicion hinges on the power of his wife's speech. Unable to persuade Polixenes to stay, he first expresses annoyance when Hermione is able to do so. Polixenes has just assured his boyhood friend, “There is no tongue that moves, none, none i' th' world, / So soon as yours could win me” (1.2.20–21). Nonetheless, it is Hermione's tongue, not her husband's, that “wins” Polixenes. “You, sir, / Charge him too coldly,” she chides Leontes before persuading their friend to stay (1.2.29–30). Leontes therefore moves quickly from “well said, Hermione” to churlish acknowledgment of her rhetorical power. He understands her persuasive speech not as obedience to his desire – since he is the one who commanded, “speak you” – but as a force that eclipses his own:

From her success, jealous deductions quickly follow.

In tracing the nature and effects of Ovid's phonographic imaginary, we have seen that tropes for the voice – both male and female – shape the representation of subjectivity in both the Metamorphoses and Petrarch's autobiographical revision of that poem in the Rime Sparse. At the same time, these tropes play a crucial role in each poem's fiercely unresolved struggle over what human bodies mean and what their differences signify. We've also seen that various figures of vocal self-dispossession – Philomela's tongue, Echo's repetitive uox, Medusa's mouth, Actaeon's lips, Diana's prohibition, Bacchic noise – darken the dream that both poets entertain, in their different ways, of an Orphic voice powerful enough to bring about the changes of which it speaks. Such figures betray a profound anxiety about the voice's limitations as an index of authorial subjectivity as well as its unpredictable relationship to both mind and world. Most important of all, the violent narratives of desire and dismemberment within which these figures for lost voices emerge warn us that we cannot separate the contradictions haunting this phonographic imaginary from the way each poem grapples with the question of the sexualized body's significance and value.

Ovid's culturally laden fantasies and anxieties about embodied voices are no less foundational to John Marston's The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image, one of the most biting satires in the tradition that Ovid inspired.

Writing in the name of love

Petrarch's complex encounter with Ovid's Metamorphoses, as critics of Renaissance literature know well, left an indelible mark on the history of European representations of the poet – particularly as that poet represented himself, or herself, as the subject of language and of desire. In rereading and rewriting Ovidian stories, Petrarch necessarily worked through a relationship fundamental to the Metamorphoses' poetic project: the mutually constituting, and mutually interfering, relationship between rhetoric and sexuality. Any attempt to account for Ovid's place in the Rime Sparse, therefore, will implicitly be commenting on rhetorical and erotic problems that ramify, extending throughout the mythographic lexicon of Renaissance poetic self-representation. In order to examine how the rhetoric of Ovidian eroticism affects Petrarch's portrait of himself in love, I consider several Ovidian characters crucial to Petrarch's representation of himself as a “martyr” to an idol “sculpted in living laurel” (12.10; 30.27): Apollo, Pygmalion, Narcissus, Actaeon, Diana and, finally, Medusa. In this chapter, I ask several related questions: precisely how – and with what formal and libidinal effects – does Petrarch read Ovid? What does that reading suggest about the relationship between language and sexuality in the Rime Sparse? And what does Ovid's presence in the Rime Sparse mean for the Petrarchan subject, particularly when the poet who would rival Pygmalion is tormented by language as well as desire? For Petrarch, like Apollo, gets his laurel leaf – a signifier in return for his impossible demand – but as soon as he reaches the tree, he finds only “such bitter fruit” that his “wounds” are more aggravated than comforted (6.13–14).

This chapter analyzes the connections among rhetoric, sexuality, and subjectivity in Ovid's Metamorphoses to enable us to see why disquieting convergences like the one between Daphne's use of figura – the form of her body – and the narrator's – Apollo's poetic tropes – continue to inform Renaissance appropriations of Ovidian narrative, particularly later imitations of Ovid that claim to speak to a difference between male and female experience. By examining what the often violent intersection between rhetoric and sexuality means for the speaking subjects of Ovid's poem, moreover, I hope to give a sense of how important it is for a feminist critique of the Metamorphoses and its afterlife that in it we encounter what Simone Viarre, following Roland Barthes, calls a “fusion between poetry and rhetoric” – a thoroughgoing conversion of rhetoric into a “poetic technique.” In other words, the punning movement of figura, the resonant word that signifies both Daphne's body and the god of poetry's speech, suggests a crucial place where a feminist analysis of the Metamorphoses might intersect widely acknowledged aspects of Ovidian poetic practice.

I have already emphasized Ovid's habit of turning poetic and rhetorical self-reflection into stories of desire and sexual violence: Apollo's rapacious desire for Daphne is also a poet's love for a figure; Pygmalion's desire to “move” his statue is also a sexual version of a rhetorician's aim to “move” his audience; Perseus first uses Medusa's os (against Atlas) as a kind of rhetorical prosthesis, enforcing the compliance that his “soothing words” cannot; the aetiological story of the Gorgon's head, in its turn, converts a rape and a beheading into the origin of the fountain of poetry; and so forth.

Purple notes

At the center of Ovid's Metamorphoses lie violated bodies. Sometimes male, at other times female, a few of these ruined forms elude the grasp of gender and its reductive nominations. Fractured and fragmented bodies from Ovid's poem cast long, broken shadows over European literary history. Sometimes, these shadows fall back on the poem that gave them shape. As Quintilian put it when deliberating the frequently heard charge that Ovid's manner is too ingenious, there is “some excuse” for his invention, since so much of it is required if this poem's author is to “assemble” such extremely diverse things into “the appearance of a unified body” (“res diversissimas in speciem unius corporis colligentem”). That a poem fascinated with the fracturing of bodies should have been passed down through the middle ages and into the Renaissance, thanks to Lactantius, predominantly in fragments, a reordered collection of pieces torn away from their original arrangement, is one of the ironies of literary history that continues to echo and ramify. For it is not merely that the body's violation is one of the poem's prominent thematic concerns. As Philomela's severed “lingua” mutely testifies – her “murmuring tongue” designating both the bodily organ and “language” as such – dismemberment informs Ovid's reflections not only on corporeal form, but linguistic and poetic as well. An elaborately self-reflexive poem, the Metamorphoses traces, in minute and sometimes implacable detail, the violent clashes between the poem's language and the many bodies of which it speaks.