ABSTRACT
Translation, Patronage and Power Lavinia’s resolute attempts to use the Metamorphoses as a means of conveying her dreadful encounter with Demetrius and Chiron to the Andronici illustrate that the relationship between early modern women and Ovid’s poem is quite different to that of men. Moving from the sexual politics of translation on the Renaissance stage, this next chapter considers a vernacular version of the Metamorphoses in a generically different, but contemporaneous, text: Abraham Fraunce’s The Third Part of The Countesse of Pembrokes Yvychurch. Entituled, Amintas Dale. Wherein are the most conceited tales of the Pagan Gods in English Hexameters together with their auncient descriptions and Philosophicall explications (1592).2 Dedicated to Mary Sidney, this complex reworking of the Metamorphoses describes a compelling scene of translation which explores further the construction of the gendered subject. The three sections which form the complete The Countesse of Pembrokes Yvychurch tell the pastoral romance of Amyntas and Phillis. The first part is a three-act play which ends with the two protagonists declaring their undying love for each other. However, as the second part of Yvychurch begins the reader learns, somewhat abruptly, that Phillis is dead. The next segment of the complete Yvychurch narrative tells of the desolate Amyntas’s eleven days of mourning which ends with the death of the heart-broken lover and his transformation into an Amaranthus: a metamorphosis which initiates Fraunce’s debt to Ovid in Amintas Dale. Both texts were published together as The Countesse of Pembrokes Ivychurch. Conteining the affectionate life, and unfortunate death of Phillis and Amyntas: That in a Pastorall; This in a Funerall: both in English Hexameters
(1591).3 In the final section, characters that have already been introduced in the play gather at the Amintas Dale of the title to commemorate ‘that solempne feast of murdred Amyntas’ (sig. A 3r) in the form of a pastoral colloquy.Under the guidance of the Lady Regent, tales from the Metamorphoses are told in verse and these are accompanied by prose explications which are offered by one of her companions, the sage Elpinus. As a text which commemorates the death of the fictional Amyntas, it is not altogether surprising that loss is inscribed throughout Amintas Dale. However, in its wider social and cultural contexts, the subject matter of Fraunce’s Yvychurch also defines it as one of the many texts produced in response to the death of Mary Sidney’s brother Philip in battle against the Spanish at Zutphen in 1586.4 Fraunce’s use of Ovidian tropes in a pastoral setting recall Sidney’s Old and New Arcadias, thus Amintas Dale immediately functions as a textual homage to his former patron.5 Moreover, the importance of Ovid’s poem in this Sidneian context is suggested by the motto from the Metamorphoses which was inscribed on the personal standard carried in his funeral procession.6 In her discussion of aristocratic funerals in early modern England, Clare Gittings has explained how ‘the ruling was that the mourners had to be of the same sex as the deceased’.7 This meant that women were ‘completely marginalized within the social process of mourning’.8 In view of this engendering of grief, publications such as The Countesse of Pembrokes Yvychurch openly acknowledge Mary Sidney’s position as bereaved sister. Nonetheless, Fraunce’s exploitation of Ovidian episodes in Amintas Dale engage with a sexual politics of loss which extend well beyond his current patron’s personal bereavement. In general, the Metamorphoses explores tensions between fundamental binary oppositions. Philip Hardie eloquently explains that ‘any and every instance of metamorphosis results in a state that is neither life nor death, but something in between. The product of every metamorphosis is an absent presence’.9 Notably, thirteen out of the sixteen Ovidian narratives featured in Amintas Dale each explore this ‘absent presence’ in a distinctly gendered fashion. Although some of the tales feature goddesses such as Diana and Minerva, who are known for their chaste and intellectual capabilities, the image of a sexualized Venus is counterpoised against one of her as a grief-stricken woman.10 However, many of the Ovidian myths that Fraunce has chosen (Syrinx and Pan, Io and Jove, Echo and Narcissus, Galathea and Acis, Proserpina and Pluto, Daphne and Apollo, Venus and Mars, Diana and Actaeon, Venus and Adonis, Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, Semele and Jove, Iphis and Anaxarete, and Pomona and Vertumnus) primarily render women as the objects of sexual desire and the subjects of death.11 Proserpina, raped and taken by Pluto to the underworld, becomes the lost object for her mother, Ceres. Syrinx, Io and Daphne, transformed into a reed, a cow and laurel, respectively, surrender their womanly identities as they flee from the gods’ amorous pursuits. Both Echo and Salmacis lose their corporeal form through dissolution. Out of Fraunce’s sample of Ovidian women, it is only Semele, one of the many mortal women who are the object of Jove’s desires, who suffers a violent death as she ‘burnèd in hir Lovers armes’.12 Bound by the sexual politics which frame the production of the
Metamorphoses in the early modern period, Amintas Dale proves to be a significant location for the interrogation of woman’s subjectivity. Fraunce begins Amintas Dale with a suitable address to his patron. The name of Mary Sidney’s Wilton residence was Yvychurch and the Latin dedication moves toward her Minerva-like apotheosis:
NYmpha Charis CharitȦn, morientis imago Philippi, Accipe spirantem post funerarursus Amintam: Accipe nobilium dulcissima dogmata vatum, Delicias, Musas, mysteria; denique, quicquid Graecia docta dedit, vel regia Roma reliquit, Quod fructum flori, quod miscuit vtile dulci. (sig. A 2r)13
The perspective of translation had progressed to such a degree that ‘by the end of Elizabeth’s reign the vernacular success of her poets had proved that English was, after all, an “eloquent” tongue, whose geographic and social marginality was coming to an end’.14 Fraunce’s own sense of eloquence is evident at the end of his dedication which contains the familiar aim of ‘teaching with delight’.15 Author of The Arcadian rhetorike: or The praecepts of rhetorike made plaine by examples Greeke, Latin, English, Italian, French, Spanish, out of Homers Ilias, and Odissea, Virgils Aeglogs, [...] and Aeneis, Sir Philip Sydnieis Arcadia, songs and sonets [...](1588), Fraunce was clearly interested in the formal ‘art of speaking’ (sig. A. 2r), as he describes it on the opening page of his rhetorical treatise.16 Similarly, in form and content, as we shall see, Amintas Dale can be viewed as a means of schooling its readers in rhetorical strategies. Jean Luis Vives’s castigation of Ovid in The Instruction of a Christian Woman (discussed in the opening chapter of this book) suggests that the Metamorphoses is an unsuitable text for a woman: an issue hinted at in the Greek aphorism ‘afar, afar, whoever is sinful’ which appears on Amintas Dale’s title page.17 However, by encasing Ovidian tales within the frame narrative of the pastoral colloquy Fraunce produces a translation of Ovid’s poem which may be fit for Mary Sidney. Translation and Contestation Storytelling in the Metamorphoses often engages with the themes of authority and subversion. Book 4 shows how the daughters of Minyas defy Bacchic ritual by means of textual production. As they spin (an act which shows their rebellion against the god’s edicts) they decide to ‘serve a better Sainct Minerva’, and to each ‘recite […]| some tale that may delight’ while they work.18 Many of their stories, such as those concerned with Pyramus and Thisbe’s clandestine meetings, Venus and Mars’ adulterous relationship and Salmacis’s pursuit of the reluctant Hermaphroditus which results in the biform figure named after the youth, are about
cultural and physical transgression. For their own insurgent behaviour, the Minyaides are turned into bats. In the following book, the Pierides challenge the nine Muses to a competition to see who can recite the most effective poetry.19 Inevitably, the mortal daughters of Pierus lose and become chattering magpies as punishment for their presumption. As the Lady Regent commands her court to recite tales in order to commemorate the death of Amyntas, Amintas Dale takes up the themes of narration and contestation which are found in the Metamorphoses. Although the pastors and nymphs give no indication that their stories are derived from the classical poem, the narrative process is clearly inscribed with Ovidian concerns. The Lady Regent’s instructions translate Ovid’s introduction to the Metamorphoses, ‘Of shapes transformed to bodies strange I purpose to entreate,| Ye gods, vouchsafe (for you are they that wrought this wondrous feate)’.20 She ‘wills every man to remember’:
Some one God transformd, or that transformed an other: And enjoynes each nymph to recount some tale of a Goddesse That was changd herself, or wrought some change in an other: (sig. A 3r)
Then sage Elpinus ‘as every tale and history drew to an ending| […] Shuld his mynd disclose, and learned opinion utter’ (sig. A 3r). In the figure of Elpinus, Fraunce constructs a discourse which is suggestive of the allegorical commentaries found in the moralized tradition of Ovidian translation,21 and it is only in the sage’s extensive remarks on the individual narratives that the classical source of the tales is explicitly disclosed. His textual authority notwithstanding, the Lady Regent’s influence on the proceedings is clearly evident, at this stage at least. She dictates the structure of the frame narrative and she also controls its content; the shepherds are to tell tales about gods and the nymphs are to tell tales about goddesses.22 However, the nymphs and pastors that make up the Yvychurch circle are not only storytellers. They may also be viewed as a group of Ovidian translators variably responding to a range of cultural and intellectual imperatives which are dictated to them by the Lady Regent and Elpinus. Indeed, Amintas Dale’s social formation has parallels with the cultural context in which Fraunce’s text is produced. As the pastoral colloquy is under authorial control, Fraunce is subject to his patron, Mary Sidney. The contest begins with Thirsis’s tale of the creation of the world out of chaos to the formation of humankind by the stones thrown by Deucalion and Pyrrha.23 To begin with, Thirsis pays close attention to his Ovidian source and he positions himself in ‘humble obeisance| made to the Lady Regent’ (sig. A 3r). After Ovid, Thirsis then turns his attention to the topics of language and meaning:
Hart conceavd noe harme; tong, harts interpreter only, Playnly without any glose or dissimulation op’ned Harts harmeles conceipts: hands, true and trusty to practyse, Did, what his hart contryu’d, or tong had truly delyv’red. (sig. A 4r)
In the Golden Age, meaning in language was transparent; in Saussurean terms there was no gap between the signifier and the signified. With the loss of the Golden Age, as Thirsis’s narrative shows, social and cultural politics have become ever more fraught as meaning in language has become increasingly opaque: Every man kept home, and where he receav’d a beginning,
There did he make his grave, and drew his dayes to an ending. Noebodie was soe mad by the ragged rocks to be ranging, And with clowds, windes, seaes, nay heav’n and hell to be stryvyng Only to spy and ly, and feede fooles eares with a wonder, How fro Geneva to Gaunt, from Gaunt he repair’d to Vienna, How fro the Turk to the Pope, fro the Pope to the Souldan of Aegipt, And at last came back fro the newfound world as an old foole, With foure Dutch-french woords, with a strange-cutt beard, or a Cassock. (sig. A 4r-A 4v)
Jonathan Haynes observes that ‘to travel was to give oneself up to mutability, and movement and change were highly suspect in the Renaissance: in a world thought to be decaying, change was synonymous with degeneration’.24 These negative aspects of Elizabethan expansion are evident in Thirsis’s tale; however, this Ovidian rendition has been subtly domesticated. Travel is shown to be the origin of deceit and duplicity, but this notion is realized in pointedly volatile religious terms. Hence, Thiris’s tale may also be in accordance with Protestant anxieties which maintained that ‘the Devil, the Pope, and the Turk all desired to “convert” good Protestant souls to a state of damnation’.25 Beginning with the famous locus of Calvinism, Geneva, the verse considers Gaunt (Ghent), an important site of Low Country Protestant/Catholic schism, before resting on Vienna, a city which resisted the rise of Protestantism through the Counter-reformation of 1551. From these geographical locations, Thirsis explicitly focuses on religious kinds: the Islamic Turk, the Catholic Pope and the Islamic ‘Souldan of Aegipt’. When the ‘traveller’ returns, possessed of ‘foure Dutch-french woords’ and sporting ‘a strange-cutt beard, or a Cassock,’26 the ‘newfound world’ has clearly transformed him into an ‘old foole’ of nondescript religious identity. More specifically, Thirsis’s tale may contain an implicit criticism of the pervasive religious fractures of the sixteenth century which led to Philip Sidney’s death in battle at Zutphen, the underlying impetus of Amintas Dale. As part of a frame-narrative which sets out to commemorate the ‘murdred Amyntas’, the pastor’s tale resonates with the violence and lawlessness typical of the iron age where:
[…] Wife longs for death of her husband, Husband loath’s his wife [...] (sig. B 1r)
By contrast, Ovid’s poem states that ‘the husband longed for the death of his wife, she of her husband’.27 Arthur Golding’s translation also equally apportions blame: ‘the goodman seekes the goodwives death, and his againe seekes shee’.28 However,
Thirsis’s rendition reduces the murderous intentions of the male figure. In a text produced for a powerful woman patron whose own position seems to have been elevated by the death of her brother, it is rather disquieting to find that Thirsis’s translation calls attention to women’s violence. As we shall see, the tales are circumscribed by and inscribed with a sexual politics of translation which becomes increasingly pronounced as Amintas Dale progresses. So far, the pastors have been telling tales which follow Saturn’s lineage. But after the second and third tales in which Menalcus and Damoetas each recount the Ovidian myths of Pan and Syrinx and Jupiter and Io, the Lady Regent exerts her authority and decides that ‘because Juno was by nature and mariage conjoined with Jupiter, they should also be jointly remembered, before any other of Saturns brood were medled withal’ (sig. D 4r). With its focus more firmly on the women’s role, Amintas Dale’s revised structure gives weight to the first episode recounted in a woman’s voice. As evinced in the eight nymphs who recount tales from the Metamorphoses, in this other world of Yvychurch, a female figure can be given more freedom to take on the role of a translator of Ovid. Whilst the nymphs’ tales of Scylla and Galatea, Proserpina and Pluto and Diana and Actaeon collude with the overarching paradigm of loss established in Amintas Dale, the stories told by Fulvia, Cassiopaea, Licoris and Dieromena are worth considering in some detail as their versions of Ovid’s Echo and Narcissus, Venus and Adonis, Minerva and Vulcan, and Iphis and Anaxarete engage with notions of translation, language and gender. Having been requested by the Lady Regent to tell a tale which concerns Juno, Fulvia is the first nymph to recite an Ovidian myth. However, she cannot summon up a story in which the goddess is the main focus. Instead, the nymph quite faithfully tells Ovid’s myth of Echo, who she says, trying to align her story with the Lady Regent’s request, ‘was alwaies taken to be Junoes daughter’ (sig. D 4r). After delivering a lively and succinct translation of the well-known narrative of frustrated female desire, ‘How many thousand times, poore soule, she desirde a desiring| And intreating speech to the wandring boy to be uttring?’ (sig. D 4v), Fulvia’s story ends with Echo’s transformation into a ‘voyce’:
Voyce, and onely the voyce of forlorne Eccho remaineth: Eccho remaineth a voyce, in deserts Eccho remaineth. (sig. E 1r)
Significantly, Fulvia does not speak of Narcissus’s legendary transformation into the flower; the object of Echo’s desire just fades away. Though Fulvia calls her ‘the prating Dandiprat Eccho’ (sig. D 4v), a vilifying epithet more usually applied to a ‘small, insignificant, or contemptible’ young boy,29 the nymph’s truncation of Ovid’s narrative keeps Echo, the subordinate female subject, in view, ultimately exploring the sexual politics of Ovid’s myth. The negation of female agency is most clearly exposed with Echo’s repetition of Narcissus’s words of rejection: ‘Eccho sayd nothing, but, I ever yeeld to thy pleasure’ (sig. E 1r).30 In this context, the various, related meanings of the word ‘yeeld’ are pertinent. Firstly, it can mean repayment. Echo’s sexual desire, of
course, is famously unrequited; the tale thus uses the term somewhat ironically. Another meaning, which also mocks the nymph’s plight, is one of production or issuing forth. Again, as she can only speak the words of others, Fulvia’s choice of vocabulary seems cruelly apt. The third and most telling sense of ‘yeeld’, however, is one which signifies surrender.31 It is this understanding of the word which is redolent not only of women’s subordination to men but also of the gender politics of textual production in the early modern period. Catherine Belsey observes that women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were ‘discouraged from any form of speech which was not an act of submission to the authority of their fathers or husbands’.32 As Echo ‘yeelds’ to Narcissus, Fulvia’s story gives way to the weight of humanist authority represented by Elpinus’s extensive gloss on her text. Pointedly, as a clear marker of his own submission to authority, the sage’s commentary ignores the figure of Echo, the subject of Fulvia’s text, and concentrates on an explication of Juno, the subject initially requested by the Lady Regent. From his lengthy comments on Fulvia’s story, it is evident that Elpinus is governed by many of the orthodox conventions of early modern gender politics. His glosses on the tales told by the men often observe their rhetorical abilities and intellectual grasp of the subject. For example, the sage states that Menalcus’s version of Pan and Syrinx is ‘short and sweet’ (sig. C 4v) and Alphesibaeus’s tale of Apollo and Daphne proves that the shepherd is ‘a good scholler of the best master’ (sig. I. 2v). By contrast, Elpinus avoids overt discussion of women’s scholarly accomplishments. His only direct observation on a myth recounted by a nymph concerns Cassiopaea’s version of Venus and Adonis. Here, Elpinus notes that the speaker ‘hath so passionately discoursed of Venus, that I feare me, under these names, she mourneth her own love, and uttreth her owne affection’ (sig. M 3r). In her discussion of Amintas Dale and the ‘inscriptions of the Countess of Pembroke’, Mary Ellen Lamb argues that ‘women readers, generally excluded from the educational process that provided erudite classical reading of myths, were surely often imaged as – and perhaps often were – fairly literal readers and receptive to such aesthetic appreciations as were available to readers without university education’.33 In the nymph’s capacity as translator rather than reader, Elpinus scrutinizes Cassiopaea’s treatment of Ovid’s myth in exactly the way that Lamb describes. In early modern modes of textual production, as other episodes in Amintas Dale illustrate, it seems that women have little success in effacing their bodies as ‘textual and sexual experience become fatally linked’.34 Fraunce’s depiction of women as translators of Ovidian tales is unusual, but he goes even further by allowing certain nymphs to deal with some fairly audacious material. One noteworthy example is Dieromena’s tale of the tragic romance of Iphis and Anaxarete; the last Ovidian myth to be recounted in Yvychurch. As an episode which has already been briefly mentioned in Sylvia’s preceding tale of Pomona and Vertumnus, it is apparently a story of some significance. Disguised as an old woman, the smitten Vertumnus tells an indifferent Pomona stories in order to ‘bow [her] hardend hart and make it for too yild’. In Sylvia’s translation, it is the ‘fatall| Fall of Anaxarete’ which shows Pomona how she should ‘learne thereby to
be lovely’ (sig. O 3r). It is this line that Dieromena reiterates and explicates in the following story which tells of ‘Iphis, a gentle youth [...]| Poore, yet rich, but rich in pure affection only’ becomes enamoured with Anaxarete, a ‘noble dame’ (sig. O 3v). Viewed in its Yvychurch setting, Dieromena’s Ovidian story is outstanding for its graphic and violent depiction of courtly love. Anaxarete, ‘Scorneful [...] with a frowning face, with a hard hart’ (sig. O 3v), continually rejects the advances of Iphis. Eventually, he is driven to suicide and his corpse is presented to Anaxarete in spectacular fashion:
[...] and there hangd woefuly tottring,
With corde-strangled throate; his sprawling feete by the downefall Knockt her dore by chaunce; knockt dore did yeeld a resounding, Yeelded a mourneful sound, and made herself to be open, Wide open, to behold so strange and woeful an object. (sig. O 4r) When Iphis’s mother views the body of her dead son she ‘clipt, kist, embraced her Iphis| Wept, cried out, hould, roard’ (sig. O 4r). Anaxarete remains aloof, until, that is, the secreted gods encourage her to look out of her window to view the passing burial procession and she saw ‘poore Iphis laid in a coffin’ (sig. O 4v). At the sight of Iphis’s dead body Anaxarete is transformed: ‘Out of that sightles sight was starck and stiffe on a sudden,| And her purpled blood to paleness speedily changed’ (sig. O 4v). At the end of her narrative, as in Sylvia’s tale, Dieromena declares that ‘Ladies’ should ‘learne to be lovely| And make more account of a gentle minde, then a gentry’ (sig. O 4v). Lamb observes that ‘the one tale that is explicated by a character other than Elpinus includes an address to “noble dames”. Dieromena […] explicates the tale of Iphis and Anaxarete not in terms of natural allegory, but as an exemplum for ladies to follow in choosing a suitor worthy of their love.’35 It is the recapitulation of the sentiment from Sylvia’s narrative that ‘Ladies’ should ‘learne to be lovely’, rather than the general exegesis of the tale, which is significant. It is by way of this reiterated line and the alliterative collocation of ‘ladies’, ‘learning’ and ‘lovely’ that Dieromena draws attention to questions of rhetorical skill, hermeneutic practice and sexual difference which underpin Fraunce’s Ivychurch project. One tale which exemplifies the complex sexual/textual politics of Amintas Dale is Licoris’s account of Vulcan’s attempts to seduce Minerva. Told by a nymph who is defined as a ‘mery lasse’ (sig. L 1v), this episode makes much of the erotic dynamic:
Vulcan limps on apace, prowd of so lovely a Lady And pearles Paragon: When he came at last to the Pallace, And there found Pallas, th’oulde buzzard gan to be bussing Th’inviolate Virgin: th’oulde fumbler gan to be fingering The immaculate mayden: who by and with a stately Frowne, and austere looke, his rashness boldly rebuked. Blacksmith intreateth, prowd Pallas stoutly denieth, Gray-beard contendeth, but manly Minerva repelleth. (sig. L 1v)
Bearing in mind that Fraunce’s dedication aligns Mary Sidney with Minerva, it is hardly surprising that the goddess is described here as a ‘pearles Paragon’, ‘inviolate Virgin’, ‘immaculate mayden’ and, most importantly, ‘manly’. The representation of Vulcan as an ‘oulde buzzard’ only heightens the goddess’s chaste and ‘stately’ position. However, Licoris has to work hard in order to maintain that representation. The account of Vulcan’s attempted rape of the goddess is more commonly found in classical Greek literature, such as Apollodorus’s the Library;36 Ovid’s poem merely carries a trace of the earlier mythology.37 The predominantly Ovidian part of the story appears in the second half of Licoris’s tale and is concerned with the birth of Vulcan’s son, Erichthonius, a ‘faire boy to the middle| But fowle snake downward’ (sig. L 2r).38 In the Metamorphoses, Minerva secretly hid the child in a casket and gave it to three sisters, Pandrosos, Herse and Aglaurus, with the instruction that they must not look inside the box. Aglaurus, however, disobeys the powerful goddess and, in the words of Licoris, ‘disclosed a boy, with a serpent’ (sig. L 2r). The actions of the wilful sister were told to Minerva by a ‘chattring Chough’ (sig. L 2r). Instead of thanking the bird, however, Minerva abandoned the ‘brew-bate crow’ (sig. L 2r) and took another for her handmaid. Whilst Licoris does not tell her audience what happened to Aglaurus, readers familiar with Ovid would know that Minerva, enlisting the assistance of Envy, ensured that the disobedient sister eventually met with a dreadful death.39 Though Minerva is obviously capable of exacting revenge, in Licoris’s narrative she is most memorable as an icon of chastity. In a manoeuvre which endorses this positive image, the nymph’s initial digression from the Ovidian narrative offers a lasting impression of Vulcan’s pursuit of the goddess:
At last, with striving and strugling stifly, the sharp-set Ould fornicator was now so thoroughly resolved, Fully resolved now, and now so fowly resolved, That the resolved blood contending long for a passage, Powr’d it self at length on th’earth, in steed of a Pallas. (sig. L 1v)
As Venus’s cuckold, Vulcan is the customary target for such treatment. However, unusual in Amintas Dale for its particular focus on the male body, Licoris’s tale also has a valuable perspective on women and language. It is not with words that Minerva manages to admonish Vulcan’s advance but ‘with a stately| Frowne, and austere looke, his rashness boldly rebuked’. Although endowed with masculine virility, a noteworthy contrast against the elderly, limping god, Minerva’s virtuous image is underlined by her silence. Lamb remarks that:
The complementary discourses of the third Ivychurch reveal competing interpretive systems that strongly imply gender. Without Elpinus’s readings, the third Ivychurch would be an anthology of love stories told by graceful pastoral characters under the direction of a lady regent, presented for the readers’ simple enjoyment of the narratives for their own sake.40
