ABSTRACT
With Princess Caroline and the accompanying assembly of aristocratic women as dedicatees, the 1717 edition of the Metamorphoses upholds the conventional gender binarism that defines the translation and reception of Ovid’s poem in early modern England. From the first known complete translation by William Caxton through to Samuel Garth’s collaborative enterprise, men publicly govern the task of rendering the Metamorphoses into English. Women, however, are constructed as Ovidian readers rather than as translators, as perceived in Tamesyn Audeley’s autograph on Caxton’s manuscript, the respective memoirs of Anne Clifford and Dorothy Osborne, and Samuel Pepys’s account of reading Ovid with his wife, Elizabeth. The reasoning behind such patriarchal superiority might be found in classical textual criticism. Quintilian’s use of the term lascivia, as observed in Chapter 1, manifestly betrays the poem’s complex textuality whilst simultaneously hinting at its sexually subversive content.2 Like Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare’s Cymbeline (c. 1609) dramatizes some of the cultural anxieties surrounding Ovid’s poem at this time. Crucially, the nature of Iachimo’s threat to Imogen is suggested by her bedtime reading: ‘She hath been reading late,| The tale of Tereus, here the leaf’s turned down| where Philomel gave up’.3 The editor of the Arden Shakespeare notes that the ‘ironic relevance [of the Metamorphoses] to the immediate situation is too obvious to require further comment’.4 Given the gendered paradigm of Ovidian translation, however, there is more to say about the appearance of Ovid’s text in Imogen’s bedchamber. Much of Iachimo’s onstage menace in this scene is achieved through the interplay of epic poem and dramatic narrative. In Shakespeare’s Jacobean play, as Jonathan Bate explains, ‘the rape is metaphorical. The text that is opened out in Titus is folded back in Cymbeline.’5 Whilst the violence of the Roman tragedy remains implicit in
the later drama, both plays present comparative, though equally problematic, social arenas for women readers of the Metamorphoses; neither Lavinia nor Imogen are viewed alone with the book. Iachimo’s comment on Philomela’s rape in terms of surrender not only effaces Ovidian concerns for the sexual politics of violence which are so brutally realized in Shakespeare’s Lavinia; the Italian’s insidious presence in Imogen’s bedchamber combined with his critical treatment of Ovid’s text also suggests that the woman’s reading matter is a subject for men to openly discuss, analyse and, of course, translate.
