ABSTRACT
Thomas Lodge’s G laucus an d S cilla has suffered the curse of “historical significance/’ of having “an importance independent of intrinsic merit.” 1 Except for a nineteenth-century attempt to fabricate a manuscript version of Venus and A d o n is written in the mid-1580s from which Lodge supposedly derived his inspiration,2 G la u cu s and S c illa has been generally accepted as the first Elizabethan epyllion. Yet this very judgment has tended to obscure the real literary value and interest of the poem. It is usually passed over with a brief plot summary and an acknowledgment that it did after all inaugurate the “vogue” of the epyllion in the 1590s. On the few occasions when G la u cu s an d S c illa has received more detailed attention, critics have complained of Lodge’s eclecticism and of the awkwardness of his writing. It is possible to acknowledge Lodge’s culpability on both these counts, however, and yet to claim that he still achieves something of genuine importance through his recasting of an episode from the M eta m o rp h o ses which, as Charles Segal points out, is particularly illustrative of a characteristically Ovidian “juxtaposition of tones, beginning . . . as a light, amorous adventure and ending in horror.”3
