Abstract
This collection of essays is not exactly a Festschrift but has something of the feel of one. It had its origins at a Shakespeare conference in Montpellier in 2013, for which Yves Peyré, recently retired from Université Paul-Valéry, delivered one of the keynote addresses; his is the first essay here, subtitled ‘A Methodological Induction’. Ruth Morse, in a ‘Foreword/Forward’, frames what follows as an homage to Peyré’s work and influence; her own essay ends the volume by quoting him, in French as well as English, from ‘the fine book [La voix des mythes dans la tragédie élisabéthaine, 1996] that lies behind the conference from which this chapter grew’ (255). Three essays are from former colleagues of Peyré’s at Montpellier; four other contributors are affiliated with other French universities. All of the essays have a clear family resemblance, one for which Peyré is indeed an appropriate honouree.
His ‘methodological induction’ offers a metaphor and an example. He takes from Roland Barthes the literary text as pâte feuilletée, a puff pastry whose delicately overlaid foliations figure a particular version of le plaisir du texte: ‘multiple layers branching off around countless interstices and alveoli’, as opposed to the ‘totalitarian tendencies’ of more authoritarian notions of literary meaning (25). The layerings that most interest Peyré are the imitative cross-referencing within both classical Greek and Latin literature and the later work that draws on them in a similar spirit: ‘When Shakespeare plays host to Ovid, he is not inviting Ovid alone into his text, he is also welcoming in Ovid reading Virgil, himself reading Homer, with all the depth, freedom and delicious lightness this multilayering engenders’ (25). Scholarship has been noting such intersections for centuries, and the accumulated catalogue has become quite large. The question is what to do with them. Their sheer mass can tempt even professionals to avoid them as antiquarian dead weight (a more prevalent attitude than you might think), but Peyré’s way is to chase them wherever they seem to lead, with an eagerness at times almost rapturous: Such texts can be best enjoyed…as belonging, each in its way, to a collective textual labyrinth…where all the pleasure consists in endlessly exploring, back and forth, prospectively and retrospectively, blind alleys, nooks and corners, open vistas, as well as false perspectives, side-lanes and twisting paths. (25)
The example, which occupies most of the essay, concerns blushing. Peyré starts with an internal echo in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, both parts of which rhyme with a fragmentary epithalamium of Sappho, which leads in turn to a poem by Tibullus. All of this is background for the ominous epithalamium for the blushing Creusa in Seneca’s Medea and the flushed cheeks of her vengeful murderer, a juxtaposition hinting beyond the paradoxes already enclosed by this nexus of comparisons at something more dire: On one hand, there is the temptation of delicious fruit blushing in the sun, superimposed onto blood rushing to the face as a result of different types of emotion; on the other, there is the blood that flows from a wounded, tortured, mangled body. (27)
The editors in their introduction sketch for the volume a general programme in which some version of this mythic feuilletage (mythic running at times into the historical) is ‘at the heart’ of a ‘joint creative process between authors and their publics’ (2). There is little interest in divining original or syncretic versions – unless they are themselves eccentric, such as Shakespeare’s ‘Ariachne’ (superimposing the names of two women resourceful with threads), which Peyré has written on elsewhere and Nathalie Rivère de Carles cites in her discussion of Arachne and Penelope. The emphasis throughout is on multiple, even conflicting sources, actively welcoming what Samuel Daniel called the ‘tract of confusion’ left by the classical tradition as Renaissance readers generally encountered it (5). Big-name literary texts (especially Ovid and Shakespeare) dominate, but they have a lot of company, with considerable attention paid to less often read authors (notably Thomas Heywood, the subject of an online editing project which Peyré heads), as well as the great and irregular array of other channels (mythographies, some very free ‘translations’, commentaries, dictionaries, sententiae, annotations which a previous reader made in the copy you happened to be reading, burlesques and travesties) through which knowledge of classical literature actually found its way to early modern consumers. These interests themselves are not in the contemporary scholarly context innovative, but the energy with which they are brought to bear is inventive and skilfully sustained.
There are some striking moves. Janice Valls-Russell, conceding up front that Shakespeare’s King John ‘contains no explicit allusion to Troy, to Andromache or to any other character from the Trojan story’ (87), proceeds, with the help of various anterior texts and also some effective staging decisions in recent productions, to articulate a powerful and uncanny subtext in which Constance and Arthur enact Andromache and Astyanax. Atsuhiko Hirota highlights two seemingly incidental ‘ovine tropes’ in The Merchant of Venice – ‘Shylock’s mention of his profit as “parti-coloured lambs” and Antonio’s self-definition as a “tainted wether of the flock”' (110) – as part of an ongoing mythic allusion made explicit by Gratiano: ‘We are the Jasons, we have won the fleece’ (3.2.241). Two other essays also anchor themselves in particular Renaissance plays. Agnès Lafont analyses the dialectic between Vergilian and Ovidian sources in Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage – in this case well-travelled territory, but filled out here with a new richness of detail. Charlotte Coffin ventures into much less familiar territory in dealing with Heywood’s Love’s Mistress, a staging of the story of Cupid and Psyche which was apparently a success when performed before its royal audience but now looks like a baffling combination of philosophic mythology, burlesque comedy and metatheatrical comment.
Other contributors centre on particular mythic or thematic complexes. Gaëlle Ginestet analyses literary and visual treatments of the rape of Europa across a range of works. These include the domineering ‘male-centred fantasies’ (158) of some of the lesser Elizabethan sonneteers – Thomas Watson, Thomas Lodge, Barnabe Barnes, Alexander Craig – who are answered on the Shakespearean stage by allusions which reconfigure the myth to reclaim agency for appropriately resourceful women: ‘the story of Europa also anticipates pleasure and hopes of discordia concors in marriage for Beatrice and Benedick’ (168). Rivère de Carles groups Arachne and Penelope as websters, both of them manifesting the skill of almost secret communication: communication sub tela, a term from weaving (what goes under the warp, i.e., the woof) that is indeed the etymology of subtilis. Under that sign the characters are capable of resisting the ‘sanitized moralisation’ (178) that they attract in the course of literary history; Rivère de Carles brings out that resistance in a number of stage plays, most interestingly Philip Massinger’s neglected The Honest Man’s Fortune. Dominique Goy-Blanquet traces the tangle of myth and politics within which both France and England claimed the Roman imperium; doing so makes possible a deft and fresh delineation of Shakespeare’s scepticism in availing himself of that tradition. Katherine Heavey has the novel (as far as I know) idea of gathering references to Medea’s murder and dismemberment of her brother Apsyrtus; they reach into a thick complex of early modern anxieties about familial and political bonds and even, in Robert Herrick’s Hesperides, ‘authorial fear about the integrity and future survival of one’s own body of writing’ (145). Morse’s concluding essay is a virtuoso examination of the ‘consistent inconsistency’ (255) waiting inside the story of Pygmalion, unpacked from Shakespeare’s single offbeat use of the name in Measure for Measure (3.2.45).
Tania Demetriou’s contribution stands a bit apart from the others as an essay in literary history and the history of classical scholarship. She takes on the question of whether there was such a genre as the classical epyllion, and what sense it makes to apply that term to some English narrative poems of the late sixteenth century. This is not just tidy housekeeping; it involves research into the barely studied fortunes of a poem on the abduction of Helen by Colluthus, stylistic brother to the Musaeus who wrote the Hero and Leander on which the most famous of the Elizabethan little epics is based. With Thomas Watson’s Latin translation of Colluthus and its parodic recasting in English by Richard Barnfield as reference points, Demetriou closes on the vexed but maybe not insoluble question of whether Marlowe’s Hero and Leander is ‘finished’. Doing so also brings her to the ‘false morn’ of Hero’s blush after her loss of virginity, the meaning of which has become an interpretive crux. The recursion to Peyré’s expansive discussion of blushing in, as it happens, the previous essay is something any student of Marlowe’s poem will want to ponder and characteristic of the unexpected and absorbing cross references generated again and again by this densely articulated set of essays and their collective methodology.