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The Influence of Thomas Watson on Elizabethan Ovidian Poetry*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 January 2019
Extract
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.
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- Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1959
Footnotes
*
Read at the Central Renaissance Conference at St. Louis 22 March 1958
References
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:
then he turns at length his watery countnance
Vnto the shril waters of Thames, and there he beginneth:
Here, O nimph, these plaints, here, O good nimph, my bewailings,
And conuey them downe to thy kinsmans watery kingdome,
Down to the worldwashing main sea with speedy reflowing:
World washing main-sea wil then conuey to the worlds end
This grieuous mourning …
So the infamous fame of wretched louer Amyntas,
… at length may pearce to Auernus,
And fyelds Elysian where blessed souls be abyding.
15 Watson is here adapting Virgil (Æneid IV, 68-73):
qualis coniecta cerva sagitta,
quam procul incautam nemora inter Cresia fixit
pastor agens telis, liquitque volatile ferrum
nescius; ilia fuga silvas saltusque peragrat
Dictaeos; haeret lateri letalis harundo.
But the source of the passage in Œnone and Paris is clearly Fraunce's translation of Watson, which runs (DIr):
Like as a trembling hart, whose heart is pearct with an arrowe,
Runs, and yet running his death still beareth about him,
Runs to the thickest groues, yet sweats and bleeds as he runneth,
Runs, and so with toyle and greefe death hasteneth onward:
Then with teares doth he seeke Dyctamus flower by the desert,
Seeks, but cannot finde Dyctamus flower by the desert