ABSTRACT
Sixteenth-century literature demonstrates the triumph of the poet over Tudor England corporeal death through its transmigration of a palpably Ovidian aesthetic into new and distinctly English formulations. Such Tudor translations and adaptations were, as the Augustan poet might have predicted, not always tied to specific, perishable textual manifestationsor even to particular Ovidian works. This chapter traces a bibliographical and bibliofictional chain of real and imagined, Ovidian and Ovidian-inspired, books in a genetic line of evolution that begins with A Mirror for Magistrates and culminates in Michael Drayton's England's Heroicall Epistles. Ovidian cores of Elizabethan literature's superficially English complainants are similarly disclosed through inscribed acts of writing and reading that are markedly Ovidian in nature. When the first edition of A Mirror for Magistrates was printed in 1559, its tragedies featured an array of complaints in the voices of English lords, kings, dukes, and even a solitary rebel; conspicuously, all of these characters are male.
