No history of the longstanding critical tradition of exploring the
Spenser-Ovid relationship has been written. In this book Professor
Stapleton constructs such a critical history: the annotations of E.
K. in The Shepheardes Calender (1579), the Enlightenment editions
of The Faerie Queene, the philological mode of the Spenser Variorum
(1932-57), and the recent, innovative work of Harry Berger and
Colin Burrow. Aside from occasional articles, no truly
comprehensive analysis of their kinship as love poets exists,
either. The author explores Spenser's emulation of Ovid's amatory
poetics. His humanist education trained him to find or construct
analogues and etiological patterns in classical texts. Therefore,
his early study of translation, intensive reading, and "versifying"
as an interrelated process guaranteed a densely allusive,
metamorphic Ovidian poetics as a natural result. The author's
predecessors focus almost exclusively on the Metamorphoses as
intertext, but do not often distinguish between early modern Latin
editions of the poem and translations such as Arthur Golding's.
Although Spenser read Ovid in his native language, during the
quarter-century of his writing career, his countrymen such as
Shakespeare, Donne, and Lodge imitate and recast the ancient
author. During this English aetas Ovidiana, a translation industry
arises simultaneously so that the entire corpus is rendered into
English, from Golding's Metamorphoses (1567) to Wye Saltonstall's
Ex Ponto (1638). Since the sixteenth century did not often read or
hear a Roman poet in prose renditions, the author uses Renaissance
poetical verse translations (with the Latin text) to explore
Spenser's variegated use of Ovid: how he sounded as early modern
English poetry. The introduction traces a history of the
Spenser-Ovid site then accounts for the importance of imitatio and
moralization to Spenser's developing poetics. The first four
chapters analyze the influence of the Tristia, Heroides, and
Metamorphoses on the 1590 Faerie Queene and The Shepheardes
Calender. The concluding chapters demonstrate the presence of the
Ars amatoria and Amores in Amoretti and Epithalamion and Fowre
Hymnes. Spenser's Ovidian Poetics is intended to complement works
such as Leonard Barkan's The Gods Made Flesh, Jonathan Bate's
Shakespeare and Ovid, Raphael Lyne's Ovid's Changing Worlds:
English Metamorphoses 1567-1632, and important essays by Colin
Burrow. In the words of Paul Alpers, Professor Stapleton does not
wish "to oppose the historical aesthetic" but to understand
Spenser's "claim to relative autonomy" in his emulation and
reconfiguration of his predecessors.
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