Hippolytus Ovidianae Phaedrae respondens

John Shepreve (or Shepery, 1509?-1542) was one of the most erudite scholars of Henrician England, who proceeded from being a fellow of the newly-created Corpus Christi College to the appointment as Greek reader at the same college and then to the professorship in Hebrew at Oxford University around 1538. He “was clearly one of the important and interesting early English humanist poets - known, read, quoted, and reprinted, and with a fame that long survived his death” (Binns 1990, 18) Many of his works are no longer extant (e.g. his Latin translation of Euripides’ Hecuba and his English translation of Seneca’s Hercules Furens have not survived), but what remains demonstrates his full mastery of classical languages.  His Hippolytus Ovidianae Phaedrae respondens – a significant specimen of the early modern vogue of imagining classical heroes writing back to their respective Ovidian Heroides (see Lyne 2004 and Nanni 2008) – was published posthumously in 1586, edited by Shepreve’s pupil, George Etherege (a physician who became Regius professor in Greek in 1547). The printer, Joseph Barnes, published in the same year Shepreve’s Summa et synopsis Novi Testamenti. Such a late publication is the reason why Stephen Cuclas believes that Shepreve’s text “obviously played a role in the development of Elizabethan Ovidian romances” (1992: 230). While Shepreve’s reputation was high, there is no direct proof of such a successful reception.

  The text is divided into three epistles: Shepreve’s dedicatory epistle to a “M. Wade”, chaplain to Henry VIII, in verse (174 elegiac couplets) – written, according to the author, in just two days; Etherege’s letter to the reader (in prose, describing the author and his aims); Hippolytus’ long epistle to his stepmother, also in elegiac couplets.

  Shepreve’s text inserts itself into a long tradition of moralising Ovid. Hippolytus is imagined as replying to his stepmother’s letter point by point, but a comparison of the length of the two missives is quite indicative: while Ovid’s text consists of 176 lines, Shepreve’s totals 1874 lines. What lies behind this prolixity is the pedagogical intent: the intended reader is, as Etherege’s preface clarifies, “bonae indolis adolescens, qui literis humanioribus incumbis” (*viiir): a young student, who needs to understand the values of virtue, chastity, and honesty, and observe with a critical eye the teachings of the classics. Hippolytus’ words to Phaedra, imbued with rhetorical artifice, are often vilely misogynistic, never trying to understand Phaedra’s feelings and actions. Phaedra is portrayed as a sly, predatory, and corrupt woman, who should be able to resist lust and sin, but does not. To see this text as being originally addressed to young students is in contrast with Shepreve’s own words, since in the preface he claims that he had considered Wade as the only reader of his work, but the pedagogical purposes of this text prove Etherege right.

      Interestingly, Shepreve proudly asserts that authors (and especially Christian authors) can, and actually, should create and modify myth (which is fabula, i.e. fictional, not historia), valuing the special truth that can be gained from a fictional text: “Quis rogo tam duras leges imponere uati / sustinet, ut prorsus nil nisi uera canat?” (275-6, in Binns’ translation, “Who, I ask, tolerates such harsh laws being imposed upon a poet, obliging him to sing only the truth” – Binns 1990: 17). Myths need to be interpreted, and cannot be taken at face value, unless such a naïve reader wants to be ridiculed (“omnia Democriti scommate digna sonant”, 709 – “everything sounds like worthy of Democritus’ biting sarcasm”). Besides, the Hippolytus and Phaedra story is further framed as a version of the biblical episode of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife – in the early modern period, this association does not constitute an anomalous reading, but given the context of Tudor productions of Seneca’s Phaedra and of Neolatin plays on Joseph, it may deserve further study (see Smith 1988: 199-203 and Lazarus 2018).    

Works Cited

Binns, James Wallace. 1990. Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: The Latin Writings of the Age. Leeds: Francis Cairns.

Cuclas, Stephen. 1992. Review of “Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England – The Latin Writings of the Age. ARCA Classical & Mediaeval Texts, Papers and Monographs, 24 by J. W. Binns”. Renaissance Studies 6: 229-33.

Lazarus, Micha. 2018. “The Dramatic Prologues of Alexander Nowell: Accommodating the Classics at 1540s Westminster”. The Review of English Studies 69: 32-55.

Lyne, Raphael. 2004. “Writing Back to Ovid in the 1560s and 1570s”. Translation and Literature 13 (2): 143-64.

Nanni, Fabio. 2008. “Appendice: Un particolare caso della ricezione delle Heroides: Le epistole di risposta composte in età moderna”. In P. Ovidii Nasonis Heroidum Epistula IV Phaedra Hippolyto: Testo Traduzione e commento, 221-30. PhD diss.: University of Parma.

Smith, Bruce R. 1988. Ancient Scripts & Modern Experience on the English Stage 1500–1700. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Binns, James Wallace. 1990. Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: The Latin Writings of the Age. Leeds: Francis Cairns.

Díaz Gito, Manuel Antonio. 2009. “La recepción de la fórmula epistolográfica del saludo en las ‘epistulae responsoriae’ humanísticas a las Heroidas de Ovidio”. In Pectora mulcet. Estudios de retórica y oratoria latinas, edited by Trinidad Arcos Pereira, Jorge Fernández López, and Francisca Moya del Baño, 2 vols, 1: 777-87. Logroño: Instituto de Estudios Riojanos.

Löwe, J. Andreas. 2004. “Shepreve, John (1509?-1542), classical scholar”. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Accessed 7 Feb. 2021. https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-25351.

Lyne, Raphael. 2004. “Writing Back to Ovid in the 1560s and 1570s”. Translation and Literature 13 (2): 143-64.

Nanni, Fabio. 2008. “Appendice: Un particolare caso della ricezione delle Heroides: Le epistole di risposta composte in età moderna”. In P. Ovidii Nasonis Heroidum Epistula IV Phaedra Hippolyto: Testo Traduzione e commento, 221-30. PhD diss.: University of Parma.

Ryan, Lawrence V. 1977. “The Shorter Latin Poem in Tudor England”. Humanistica Lovaniensa 26: 101-31.

Schmitz, Götz. 1990. “Libertinae and matronae in Ovid’s Metamorphoses”. In The Fall of Women in Early English Narrative Verse, 44-8. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

According to the USTC, there are five extant witnesses of John Shepreve’s Hyppolitus Ovidianae Phaedrae Respondens (1586), preserved in the UK (one at the British Library and two in Oxford, at the St John’s College Library and at the Bodleian Library) and the US (at the Huntington Library and at the Folger Shakespeare Library). The witness used for this edition is the one preserved at the Bodleian Library (A 15 4 Art./ Wood 113 1). It is an octavo of 80 pages (signatures: *⁸ A-D⁸). Shepreve’s text is also preserved in manuscript form (Corpus Christi College, Oxford, MS 266).

  The leaf preceding the title page features a handwritten bibliographical list; all books indicated, except for Shepreve’s, were published ranging from the 1650s to the 1670s. The only other handwritten note is at the bottom of the title page, indicating the date of publication as “An. 1584”. As a matter of fact, the title page does not feature a publication date, but contains an ornate Oxford University crest, with three crowns in the middle and the motto “Sapientiae et Felicitatis”, framed at the corners by what looks like two satyrs at the bottom and the personifications of glory and fame at the top. There are two ornate initials (* viiir and A i r), but no running titles. The text of the poem and the editor’s epistle are written in italics, while the preface is in Roman. The elegiac couplets are marked by the layout: each pentameter is indented. It is noteworthy that there are several open inverted commas signalling commonplace marks.

P. Ovidius Naso, Epistulae, Phaedra Hippolyto