(Emanuel Stelzer)
Classical myths reached the Elizabethans through several channels, both textually and iconographically. From the point of view of images, myths could be found anywhere, from embroideries passed down from generation to generation to painted cloths displayed on the walls of inns, from emblem books to engravings embellishing books of the most disparate nature. Such different iconographical materials disseminated the knowledge of myths virtually across all social tiers. But such images were often not free of allegorical interpretations, just like the ancient texts which through many mediations reached English readers (see Bush 1932, Seznec 1940, Allen 1970). For example, Latin editions and English translations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses featured allegorical interpretations of single myths, whether euhemeristic, moral, Neoplatonic, Christian-typological, physical, astronomical/astrological or a combination thereof, to the point that very often the narrative nucleus of the myth risked losing its significance, overshadowed, as it was, by a plethora of allegorical meanings attached to it.
The application of allegorical readings to myths began already in the classical period, especially among the Neoplatonists (for instance, in Porphyry’s Περὶ τοῦ ἐν Ὀδυσσείᾳ τῶν νυμφῶν ἄντρου, On the Cave of the Nymphs in the Odyssey, second century CE, translated into Latin by Conrad Gessner in 1542, USTC: 676439) and the Stoics. The paramount example was Lucius Annaeus Cornutus’ Theologiae Graecae compendium (first century CE) which was translated into Latin by Konrad Klauser in 1543 (Cornuti sive Phurnuti de natura deorum gentilium commentarius, USTC: 625549). For instance, Cornutus read the Prometheus myth as an account of the workings of pronoia (providence/human foresight) and the rape of Persephone as a way to understand the seasonal cycle. This is the author Sidney refers to in his Defence of Poesy in the passage in which he advocates the epistemological value of myths:
I conjure you . . . to believe, with Clauserus, the translator of Cornutus, that it pleased the Heavenly Deity by Hesiod and Homer, under the veil of fables, to give us all knowledge, logic, rhetoric, philosophy natural and moral, and quid non? to believe, with me, that there are many mysteries contained in poetry which of purpose were written darkly, lest by profane wits it should be abused. (Sidney 1987, 147)
Early Christian allegorical readings of Graeco-Roman myths can be exemplified by Macrobius’ Saturnalia (c. 400 CE) and Fulgentius’ Mythologiae (fifth – early sixth century), which were widely read in the Middle Ages and were instrumental in justifying the circulation of ancient pagan fables to be learned by Christians as long as they were understood as moral tales and/or parascientific accounts of natural events. This tradition paved the way for one of the most notorious allegorical interpretations of The Metamorphoses, the so-called Ovide moralisé (fourteenth century). Such allegorical readings did not disappear in the Renaissance: quite on the contrary, they were often intensified, systematised, and critically investigated. This process occurred in parallel with the rediscovery of classical mythographies: Hyginus’ Fabulae seem to have gone “almost unknown between late antiquity and the sixteenth century” (Hays 2008, 76) as they were preserved in a single codex (princeps: 1535, USTC: 617528), while the Bibliotheca of pseudo-Apollodorus started being published only in the 1550s and Diodorus Siculus’ Bibliotheca Historica, featuring Book 4 (devoted to Greek mythology), was carefully edited by Henri Estienne in 1559 (USTC: 450482).
In order to make sense of the ubiquitous allegorical readings found in some of his colleagues’ works, John Marston wrote that he had to consult a number of texts which he deemed indispensable:
Reach me some poets’ index that will show,
Imagines Deorum,Book of Epithets,1
Natalis Comes, thou I know recites,
And makestanatomy of poesy . . .
Delphic Apollo, aid me to unrip
These intricate deep oracles of wit.
(1598, D1r-D1v)
He specifically refers to Vincenzo Cartari’s mythographical compendium Le Imagini con la sposizione dei dei de gli antichi (first published in Venice in 1556, USTC: 819162, but best known through the illustrated editions featuring Bolognino Zaltieri’s etchings) in Antoine du Verdier’s Latin translation, Imagines deorum, qui ab antiquis colebantur (1581, USTC: 141828).2 Cartari’s work was also translated into French (Les Images des Dieux, 1610, USTC: 6901300, with several reprints), often in combination with Étienne Laplonce Richette’s L’Histoire genealogique des dieux des Anciens, modelled on the quite popular Genealogia deorum gentilium by Giovanni Boccaccio (princeps: 1472, USTC: 996759). Marston also mentions Natalis Comes (i.e. Natale Conti), whose Mythologia (first published in 1567, USTC: 823826, and with more than twenty reprints and editions in the following decades) seems to have been on the bookshelf of many an English dramatist and, curiously (for us), appears to have been Edmund Spenser’s primary mythological text, together with Boccaccio, instead of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (see Lotspeich 1965, v and passim). George Chapman, Michael Drayton, Thomas Heywood, and Samuel Daniel are among the authors who are known to have relied on Comes (see Mulryan and Brown 2006). Ben Jonson copiously refers to Comes, Cartari and Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia (princeps: 1593, USTC: 852651) in the glosses to his masques, as well as, more sparsely, to Giglio Gregorio Giraldi’s De deis gentium (1548, USTC: 629427). Although Jonson is often thought to be atypical of Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists, his reliance on mythographical compendia is not exceptional, since “continental mythographies were immensely popular in England” (Hartmann 2018, 1). They were scavenged by artists, poets, and dramatists:
These manuals were not only composed for the edification of the erudite but for the information of artists who wished to represent the figures of the gods and of poets who wished to write about them . . . they were used not only by scholars but by poets painters , and all those who wished to recreate the antique deities , verbally or visually – and not least by the devisers of court festivals, in which Olympus’ faded hierarchy played a bright and overwhelmingly important part. (Gordon 1943, 122).
A couple of quick examples may suffice to demonstrate the ubiquity of Comes among the dramatists. The details about Lyly’s monster Agar in Gallathea match those given by the Italian mythographer about the sea-monster slain by Hercules in the Hesione myth (Allen 1934, 451-2). Faustus’ reference to Orion’s “drizzling look” (B text, 1.3.2) has been understood as proof that Marlowe read Comes’ interpretation of Orion as a rain cloud (see Marlowe 2013, 75). Finally, in his Tragedy of Hoffman (c. 1602), Henry Chettle has a character recite four lines in Latin on the topic of death lifted from Comes’ section on Triton (see Stelzer 2018).
On the other hand, the English mythographies of the period, well-studied by Anna-Maria Hartmann (2018), do not seem to have had a major impact on the Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights. They were: Stephen Bat(e)man’s The Golden Book of the Leaden Gods (1577, USTC: 508296); Abraham Fraunce’s Amintas Dale (1592, USTC: 512091, which borrowed from Georg Sabinus’ allegorical reading of Ovid’s Metamorphoses), and Francis Bacon’s De Sapientia Veterum (1609, USTC: 3004037, translated into English by Arthur Gorges in 1619, and even into Italian in 1617, with several reprints). Batman called myths “erroneous trumperies Antiquitie hath bene nozzeled [with]”, no sig.; appended to the descriptions of the pagan gods those of Papist heretics; and, in general, gave the shortest account possible of the gods’ attributes, leaving instead large space to moralistic interpretations. However, Fraunce’s fairly derivative work is significant, since, for example (as A.B. Taylor 1987 has demonstrated) it was through Fraunce that Shakespeare may have got into contact with a quotation from Lucretius expressing his Epicurean views: a passage in Cymbeline 1.6.54-5 (“That satiate yet unsatisfied desire, that tub / Both fill’d and running”) is based on Fraunce’s borrowing from Sabinus’ Fabularum Ovidii interpretatio (Cambridge edition: 1584, USTC: 510073, which included Comes’ treatise on the utility of the ancient fables) which refers to Lucretius’ interpretation of the Danaides as “unthankfull mindes and unsatiable desires” (30v – cf. De Rerum Natura 3, 1003-10).
It was especially through such compendia that knowledge deriving from classical mythographical texts could circulate among Elizabethans and Jacobean dramatists, especially given the “commonplace book culture” marking the early modern cultural context (see Smyth 2010). For instance, let us consider the case of Hesiod’s Theogony which was first translated into English only in 1728. Spenser drew on it especially through Bonino Mombrizio’s Latin translation (Scully 2015, 170), but what about the dramatists? An example can be the following. In Dido, Queen of Carthage, Venus says that Oceanus should show concern for Aeneas, her son: “For my sake pity him, Oceanus,/ That erstwhile issued from thy wat’ry loins, / And had my being from thy bubbling froth” (1.11-126-9). Here Venus is referring to her birth from the foam produced after the sky-god’s castration, as recounted in Hesiod (Th. 173-200), although here Marlowe foregrounds the sea (Oceanus) as Venus’ progenitor rather than the sky (Uranus). It seems likely that Marlowe attended lectures on Hesiod at Cambridge (Kuriyama 2010, 45) but he did not need to read an edition of the Theogony to know this particular myth, which was recounted, for example, in Comes (“fabulantur è Coeli genitalibus partibus à Saturno caesis”, 1581, 381), Cartari (“raccontano le fauole, ch’ella nacque della spuma del mare, hauendoui Saturno gittato dentro gli testicoli, ch’ei tagliò à Celo suo padre”, 1581, 444), Giraldi (“coelo, ex cuius a Saturno amputates testiculis, et in mare deiectis, ut dictum est, Venerem natam fabulantur”, 1548, 534), but also in English texts such as John Maplet’s 1581 astrological treatise The Dial of Destiny (USTC: 509395) filled with mythological references: “[poets] haue it also in opinion that this Venus was bred first and came of the froth or bloude that flowed forth from ye Priuities of Coelus whom Saturne gelt, and cut of, and threwe them into the sea” (C4r).
Works Cited
Allen, D.C. 1970. Mysteriously Meant: The Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical Interpretation in the Renaissance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press.
— 1943. “Neptune’s ‘Agar’ in Lyly’s Gallathea”. Modern Language Notes 49: 451-2.
Bush, Douglas. 1932. Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Gordon, D.J. 1943. “The Imagery of Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Blacknesse and The Masque of Beautie”. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 6: 122-41.
Hartmann, Anna-Maria. 2018. English Mythography in its European Context, 1500–1650. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hays, Gregory. 2008. “Did Chrétien de Troyes Know Hyginus’ Fabulae?”. Romance Philology 62 (1): 75-81.
Kuriyama, Constance Brown. 2010. Christopher Marlowe: a Renaissance Life. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
Lotspeich, H.G. 1965. Classical Mythology in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser. New York: Octagon Books.
Marlowe, Christopher. 2013. Doctor Faustus: The B Text, edited by Mathew R. Martin. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press.
— 2021. Complete Plays, edited by Mark Thornton Burnett. London: Everyman.
Marston, John. 1598. The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image and Certaine Satyres. London: Edmond Matts.
Mulryan, John, and Stephen Brown, eds. 2006. Natale Conti’s Mythologiae. 2 vols. Tempe, Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
Scully, Stephen. 2015. Hesiod’s Theogony: from Near Eastern Creation Myths to Paradise Lost. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Seznec, Jean. 1940. La Survivance des Dieux Antiques. London: Warburg Institute.
— 1933. “Les manuels mythologiques italiens et leur diffusion en Angleterre à la fin de la Renaissance”. Mélanges de l’École française de Rome 50: 276-92.
Shakespeare, William. 2020. Cymbeline, edited by Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Sidney, Philip. 1987. Selected Writings, edited by Richard Dutton. Edinburgh: Carcanet.
Smyth, Adam. 2010. “Commonplace Book Culture: a List of Sixteen Traits”. In Women and Writing, c.1340-c.1650: the Domestication of Print Culture, edited by Anne Lawrence-Mathers and Phillipa Hardman, 90-110. Woodbridge and Rochester, NY: York Medieval Press and Boydell Press.
Stelzer, Emanuel. 2018. “The Duchess’s Elegiac Couplets in Henry Chettle’s The Tragedy of Hoffman”. Notes and Queries 65 (4): 556-7.
Taylor, A.B. 1987. “Two Notes on Shakespeare and the Translators”. The Review of English Studies 38 (152): 523-6.
1 Seznec (1933, 19n3) suggests that this “Book of Epithets” may refer to Ravisius Textor’s Epithetorum opus absolutissimum . . . lexicon vere poeticum (1558, USTC: 123299).
2 Cartari was also partially translated into English by Richard Linche, The Fountain of Ancient Fiction (1599, USTC: 514020).