ABSTRACT
‘Transmission’ is a word associated with both stories and diseases. Both may lie dormant for a while, mutate or spread like wildfire. We may inherit them from our parents or pick them up from a complete stranger. Disease is more than a metaphor in the case of one particular Ovidian narrative’s transmission in the early modern period. Some early sources for the story of Cephalus and Procris make reference to a mysterious venereal complaint, and this element of the narrative gives the protagonist’s name a retrospective significance. In this chapter, I probe the possible connections between Cephalus and syphilis, and survey other distinctive features of the tale’s transmission in the early modern period. In particular, I trace a contaminatio between Cephalus and Procris and Pyramus and Thisbe, a process which enabled the story to infect A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
