The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s Image

The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s Image and Certain Satires (1598) was John Marston’s first printed work (entered in the Stationers’ Register on 27 May), and although he published it under a pseudonym, he acquired soon fame because of it, placing him besides Joseph Hall as England’s foremost satirist. The author’s youth should be noted: in 1598, he was just 22, residing at the Middle Temple with his father, a lawyer. In the 1610s, Marston authored significant plays such as The Malcontent and The Dutch Courtesan, and was at the centre (or even sparked) the so-called War of the Theatres, which saw the involvement of Jonson, Dekker, Middleton, and possibly Shakespeare. Scholars are divided over Marston’s intention in writing The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s Image: was he parodying Ovidian epyllia such as Venus and Adonis and Hero and Leander, or is his text not a parody, but a genuine specimen of that genre, one which simply pushes the erotic sensuality typical of epyllia slightly further? Interestingly, Keach considers Pygmalion as a “comic embodiment of the pseudo-Petrarchan wooer” (1977: 138; see also Finkelpearl 1965): we could regard this text not as a mock epyllion (see Cross 1960), but as an epyllion that tries, perhaps unsuccessfully, to refuse its own genre.   

  What is clear is that this text was considered lascivious by some of Marston’s contemporaries. Already in 1598, Marston in The Scourge of Villainy defended himself against someone who accused him of writing the Metamorphosis to propagate “maggot-tainted lewd corruption” (E6r). Marston (or better, his satirist-persona, “W. Kinsayder”) claims that he had written with his “idle quill” “such lewd stuff” (E7v) simply “[t]o fish for fools” (E8r), i.e. those hypocritical poetasters who themselves delight in such verses; he had simply followed the fashion of his times, he who “was create to whip” them (E6r). There are good grounds to believe this was Marston’s original stance, since, unlike the other epyllia, his Metamorphosis was not published alone, but together with a collection of satires. That Marston relied on the popularity of Shakespeare’s poem is indubitable: he employs the same stanza form which Shakespeare had used in Venus and Adonis (six lines of iambic pentameter rhyming ABABCC) and he selects Pygmalion, Adonis’ ancestor (Adonis was the child of Cinyras, who, in some versions of the story, married Metharme, or alternatively was the son of Paphos – both being Pygmalion’s children).

Marston follows the Ovidian version related in Book 10 of The Metamorphoses closely, except that Paphos, Pygmalion’s child, in Ovid is a daughter, while Marston (and other authors, including Arthur Golding – “This Ladye was delivered of a Sun that Paphus hyght”, 10.323) has him beget a son. Indeed, the gender of Paphos and a few lexical choices may show that Marston read his Ovid in Golding’s English translation, not in the original Latin.

  The language used by Marston is deliberately equivocal. Pygmalion is repeatedly described as a “fond” man, or as someone who acts “fondly”, punning on the two meanings of these terms, affection and foolishness. Pygmalion is presented not only as a misogynist (“Knowing their [i.e. women’s] wants, and men’s perfection”, 1.4), but also eminently as a haughty narcissist: “O what alluring beauties he descries / In each part of his fair imagery” (4.3-4). Moreover, the insistence on his erotic touching and fondling of the statue lends itself to a critique of Catholic sense-bound idolatry (“Look how the peevish papists crouch, and kneel / To some dumb idol with their offering”, 14.1-2.). Yet, for all the various obscene innuendos, when it comes to portray the sexual intercourse itself, Marston shies away: “Peace, idle Poesy, / Be not obscene though wanton in thy rhymes” (38.3-4). Still, Marston manages well to describe the effect of the metamorphosis, especially because he retains the Ovidian imagery of the wax, and aptly shows how, while the stone of the statue turns into supple flesh, also Pygmalion reexperiences life after the “deathly swoon” (30.5) of desperation. On the other hand, the statue, endowed with life, is not endowed with agency: she is given neither name, nor voice, and only responds to Pygmalion’s physical contact.  

  The text is articulated as follows. After a witty epistle in verse dedicated to “Good Opinion” personified, Marston included a rather superfluous argument of the poem (A4r and v.), to which is appended a poem “To His Mistress” in rhyming couplets. There follows the text itself (A6r-B7v). The four Satires have their own titlepage, but are introduced by a poem “in praise of” The Metamorphosis of Pigmalion’s Image (C1r-C2v). Actually, the poem does not really praise the precedent text, but has more of a self-deprecating nature, preparing the readers for the change in genre which awaits them, from epyllion to satire.  

Works Cited

Cross, Gustav. 1960. “Marston’s Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image: A Mock-Epyllion”. Etudes Anglaises 13: 332-6.

Finkelpearl, Philip J. 1965. “From Petrarch to Ovid: Metamorphoses in John Marston’s Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image”. English Literary History 32: 333-48.

Keach, William. 1977. “The Epyllion and Late Elizabethan Satire: The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image”. In Elizabethan Erotic Narratives: Irony and Pathos in the Ovidian Poetry of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and their Contemporaries, 134-61. New Brunswick, NK: Rutgers University Press.

Bibliography

Colley, John Scott. 1973. “‘Opinion’ and the Reader in John Marston’s Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image”. English Literary Renaissance 3: 221-31.

Cross, Gustav. 1960. “Marston’s Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image: A Mock-Epyllion”. Etudes Anglaises 13: 332-6.

Davenport, Arnold, ed. 1961. The Poems of John Marston. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Enterline, Lynn. 2000. “‘Be not obsceane though wanton’: Marston’s Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image”. In The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare, 125-51. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Finkelpearl, Philip J. 1965. “From Petrarch to Ovid: Metamorphoses in John Marston’s Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image”. English Literary History 32: 333-48.

Hernández Santano, Sonia. 2002. “Marston’s The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s Image: The Ovidian Myth Revisited”. Yearbook of the Spanish and Portuguese Society for English Renaissance Studies 12: 259-68.

Horne, R.C. 1986. “Voices of Alienation: The Moral Significance of Marston's Satiric Strategy,” The Modern Language Review 81: 18-33.

Hulse, Clarke. 1981. “Jerking Sharp Fang’d Poesie”. In Metamorphic Verse: The Elizabethan Minor Epic, 66-70. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Ingram Reginald W. 1978. “Pigmalions Image: The Metamorphosis of a Poet”. In John Marston, 21-4. Boston: Twayne Publishers.

Keach, William. 1977. “The Epyllion and Late Elizabethan Satire: The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image”. In Elizabethan Erotic Narratives: Irony and Pathos in the Ovidian Poetry of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and their Contemporaries, 134-61. New Brunswick, NK: Rutgers University Press.

Rico, Barbara Roche. 1985. “From ‘Speechless Dialect’ to ‘Prosperous Art’: Shakespeare’s Recasting of the Pygmalion Image”. Huntington Library Quarterly 48: 285-95.

Shelburne, Steven. 1989. “Principled Satire: Decorum in John Marston’s The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image and Certaine Satyres”. Studies in Philology 86: 198-218.

Witness Description

According to the USTC, there are eighteen extant witnesses of John Marston’s The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s Image and Certain Satires (513739), preserved in the UK and the US – two in London (at Westminster Abbey, and at the British Library), one at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and five in the US (at the Huntington Library, at Pierpont Morgan Library, NY, at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Austin, with two witnesses at the Folger Shakespeare Library).  The witness used for this edition is the one preserved at the British Library. It is an octavo of 96 pages (the first leaf and the last two leaves are blank; signatures: A-F⁸). The title page bears a modern handwritten note which has not been reproduced in the diplomatic transcription. The work as such is anonymous, since John Marston signs himself with a pseudonym, “W. K.” (see note in the text).

  All pages feature ornaments both at the top and at the bottom, and there are also ornate initials of particular quality (depicting owls, grotesque figures, etc.). While the name of the bookseller, Edmond Matts, is displayed in the title page, the name of the printer, James Roberts, is shown only on page 82. The same page features a concise list of “Faults escaped”. The text does not use black letter, while the main text of the poem is in Roman, with the use of italics for titles and emphasis. The stanzas of The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s Image are numbered with Arabic numerals.

  The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s Image was reprinted in 1613 in Alcilia. Philoparthen’s Loving Folly by anonymous (a quarto which in turn was republished in octavo format in 1619 and again in quarto in 1628, and which had first been published in 1595, obviously without Marston’s poem). The printer was Richard Hawkins, and this collection included also some of Sir John Harington’s epigrams and Samuel Page’s Amos and Laura. In the case of Marston’s poem, there are differences in the layout and spelling, but no substantial variants (with a partial exception: in stanza 5, “though” replaces “thought”, an apparent mistake). However, one should signal that the probable error in the last stanza of the 1598 edition (“Cyrus” for “Cyprus”) is reproduced in the 1613 Alcilia, while it is corrected in the second and third edition; the second, but not the third edition, has “goddesse” instead of “gods” in stanza 24. Apart from these two cases, we agree with Davenport’s edition (1961: 31) in stating that “[t]he reprints of Pigmalion in Alcilia (1613, 1619, 1628) are of no authority”.

  Since for the purposes of GEMS only The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s Image is relevant, the satires (21-82) have not been transcribed, except for the introductory poem, which comments on that text.