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Epyllia Lecture
Def. epyllion = ‘little epic’, generally understood as a counterdiscourse, ie. oppositional even dissident in relation to ‘official’ literature, ‘high’, ‘serious’, ‘national/imperial’; Ovid rather than Virgil; sex rather than war; in practice, therefore, erotic narratives. Popular form: first popularized by Thomas Lodge Scilla’s Metamorphosis (1589); followed by Hero and Leander (1593 tho’ not published until 1598), Venus and Adonis (1593) – both highly popular, successful, went through numerous editions before 1640 (H&L x 10; V&A x 16 – indeed, V&A = most popular thing Shakespeare wrote, more contemporary allusions to V&A than any of Shakespeare’s other works); others listed on handout.
H&L and V&A both written 1593 – London theatres closed that summer owing to plague and remained shut for remainder of that year and whole of year following; Marlowe and Shakespeare both playwrights forced to look elsewhere for livelihood; classic move – turned to writing poetry. Different kind of self-presentation: being a playwright and earning your living by writing for the public stage was considered socially low, writing poetry = understood as a way of showing off, of displaying your wit and rhetorical skill, of demonstrating your learning, intelligence and education. Both Marlowe and Shakespeare therefore present themselves here not as the authors of popular plays but as the refined and sophisticated poets with pretensions to produce ‘golden’ or ‘aureate’ verse. V&A alludes to/quotes from H&L indicating that H&L = written first and in circulation/known to Shakes. Closely related, & will touch on common themes in course of the lecture. Will start, however, with H&L and move to V&A in 2nd half.
Marlowe: Elizabethan bad boy. What said about oppositional, dissident aspect of epyllion fits in with his reputation for notoriety; both his actions and his textual productions flew in the face of the authorities; arrested 4 times, 3 x for brawling, once for counterfeiting money; 1593 stabbed to death in a pub brawl in Deptford for not paying bar bill; in 1599 the Church ordered his translation of Ovid’s Amores to be publicly burned; his plays centre on characters variously dissident, deviant, delinquent, defiant – Dr. Faustus, Edward II, Tamburlaine; the Baines note (on handout).
H&L: left unfinished at Marlowe’s untimely death, not published until 1598 (with a ‘continuation’ by George Chapman). Source text: poem written in Greek by Musaeus (living in Alexandria, 5th century AD, ie. post-empire, period of cultural/political collapse). Story well known in 16th century: both in the original Greek, + Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, & possibly English translations. Marlowe’s poem breaks off before the end (‘Desunt nonulla’ = ‘something is missing’). In Musaeus, Leander returns to Hero after first night of lovemaking, drowns en route; overcome with grief, Hero kills herself. H&L in heroic couplets; opening lines = suggestive of high tragedy (‘On Hellespont, guilty of true-love’s blood / In view and opposite, two cities stood, ‘ Sea-borderers, disjoined by Neptune’s might’); but need to ask whether Marlowe’s poem = really ‘unfinished’: early sense of foreboding = completely out of tune with tone of poem (bawdy, comic, sensuous, over the top); the sexual ‘climax’ of his poem (which ends with the lovers’ first night of sex together, not death) = in keeping with spirit of other Greek novellas of late Antiquity, eg. Daphnis and Chloe by Longus (late 2nd/ early 3rd century AD) about two sexually inexperienced young lovers who try everything to assuage love’s pain (holding hands, kissing, lying on top of one another, etc) only to find it getting worse until (after many teasing pages) they finally work out what they have to do to achieve full sexual satisfaction. Not a direct source but genre lends much to H&L’s spirit of tease, the risqué, irreverent, titillating, etc. Master source behind all this, of course, is Ovid: great classical spokesman for sexual desire; Virgil’s contemporary but from classical times counter to ‘official’, culturally approved forms of subjectivity and manhood (epic, heroic, dutiful, self-sacrificing etc). As noted above, Marlowe translated Ovid’s Amores (probably when still an undergraduate at Cambridge) which Church banned (poems on how to seduce women, bribe their servants, maintain an erection, etc); would also have been familiar with Metamorphoses: collection of stories that show sexual desire as natural – almost impersonal – energy that drives and animates the universe; everything in a permanent state of flux and change; staples of the heroic, Virgilian, ‘Roman’ ethos – duty, service to the state, self-control, pietas – incapable of facing down the perverse.
OK, so thro’ literary sources/allusions/references H&L signals itself as counter to such ‘official’ forms (compare FQ!) as dissident, oppositional, subversive. So in what remains will organise this section of the lecture round 3 headings: 1) sex; 2) gender; 3) porn.
1) Sex
H&L clearly prioritises sexual pleaure/enjoyment; Marlowe departs from Musaeus (‘intentionally’??) by ending at consummation; everything in his poem = structured to culminate in the lovers’ sexual climax; digressions and lengthy descriptions = designed to build up tension and propel reader to that conclusion; indeed, they serve no other function; much of poems 800-odd lines show poet’s ingenuity in spinning out the delay as long as he can (note what said above about poetry being seen as a way for poet’s to show off); descriptions minute and detailed to the point of hyperbole; Hero’s resistance less to do with her chastity than a device to maximise the sexual climax the narrator is building towards (‘Venus’ nun’ = prostitute, see handout); Leander’s lengthy carpe diem speech (c.100 lines – many arguments in which, incidentally, = drawn from Ovid’s Amores) pointless insofar as Hero is persuaded already (‘Come thither’); long digression about Mercury and Cupid (about poets not being appreciated /recognised /rewarded), or the first failed attempt to make love properly, or the delay which god Neptune’s attentions cause in Leander’s efforts to swim back to Hero = all delaying tactics that serve the purpose of filling out space and time. Result: 95% of the poem = taken up with preliminaries, ‘courtship’, space of eroticised (fore)play that precedes/stands outside of the ‘official’ as represented by regularised, legalised sexual relations ie. marriage. This in itself = a form of perversion: see Freud on handout.
Despite – or because of – this delay, everything in the poem gets eroticised:
a) the bodies of the lovers (Leander’s naked body – handout),
b) the clothes they wear (Hero’s dress – handout);
c) the landscape they are in (sun, moon, sea are not geographical, astronomical phenomena but gods/goddesses driven by desire for the lovers – Apollo, Cynthia, Neptune),
d) the buildings they occupy: Temple of Venus (decorated with scenes of perversity, adultery, paedophilia, homosexuality, etc from Metamorphoses = porn palace – handout); Hero’s tower (synecdoche for her all-too-open body – handout),
e) the language they/the narrator speaks (double entendres – handout)
2) Gender
OK. So H&L = a dirty book. So now think about the impact this has on representations of gender – which are notably fluid in this poem; poem like this helps us to appreciate how modern concepts of ‘heterosexual’ or ‘homosexual’ = anachronistic, out of place, inappropriate here. As poem’s irreverent, subversive take on sexual mores/’norms’ suggests, any pre-conceived ideas of ‘traditional’/‘proper’/‘approved’ gender roles, sexual identity, sexual orientation = also up for grabs; challenges conventional positionings more than simply celebrating pre-marital sex: esp in erotic, ‘homosexual’ encounters. Leander = feminised throughout: like Hero he has white skin, golden hair; he blushes; unlike her, his naked body = described; he = like the naked Adonis embroidered on her sleeve: boyish, sexually immature, the object of predatory sexual attention: ‘His presence made the rudest peasant melt, / That in the vast uplandish country dwelt; / The barbarous Thracian soldier, moved with naught, / Was moved with him and for his favour sought. / Some swore he was a maid in man’s attire’ (79-83); see also the homoerotic scene between Leander and Neptune: ‘He [Neptune] watched his arms, and as they opened wide, / At every stroke betwixt them he would slide / And steal a kiss, and then run out and dance / And, as he turned, cast many a lustful glance / And throw him gaudy toys to please his eye, / And dive into the water and there pry / Upon his breast, his thighs, and every limb, / And up again and close beside him swim / And talk of love’ (667-75). The watery, melting nature of these encounters signals how Marlowe is highlighting their gender fluidity. Topic of high anxiety in the period: in C16 (derived from classical medical/anatomy texts) sexual morphology = understood to be highly fluid, reversible: male and female bodies could ‘revert’ to one another at any time: see Galen on handout (if time, mention Montaigne’s 1580 travel journal on Marie-Germain and the pigs]. Anatomical difference between the sexes melts/breaks down/collapses in Ovidian universe where sexual object = indeterminate boy/girl. All this is Marlowe provocatively playing into period’s horrified fascination with gender fluidity: as in transvestism, cross-dressing etc on contemporary stage.
3) Porn
So H&L = sexy, perverse; dissolves patriarchally approved gender roles. Or does it? As sexually titillating – pornographic – poem, does it also re-assert a patriarchal or at least ‘masculinist’ point of view in the end? Yes. Insofar as both H & L are presented as sexual objects (feminised, passive, immature, etc) they are alike objects of an appraising, predatory male eye/’I’: that of the ‘customer/client’. Indeed, the very feminisation of Leander serves to affirm that the figures who find him attractive conform to all the stereotypes of the ‘vigorous’, ‘lusty’, ‘hetero-oriented’ male (the peasants, soldiers, gods etc mentioned above): all figures with whom the presumably male reader (note literacy etc) = invited to identify. See David Miller on handout: determinant of ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ identity has more to do with positionality than anatomy: ie. to take the object position = to be feminine, regardless of whether the body in question is male or female; to take the subject position = to be masculine with the same proviso. H&L also argues for male poetic authority (Mercury digression; complaint that poets are not rewarded). Ironically, this ‘subversive’ poem could be argued to re-assert subject position (writer/reader) as male & so reinforce gender stereotypes after all…
Venus and Adonis
Shakespeare = self-consciously presenting different version of himself: not popular writer of stage plays but print poet – see Dedication to Southampton and quote from Ovid’s Amores: at once signals 1) self-positioning as not ‘low’ (the base mob) but ‘high’ (Apollo = golden god of aureate poetry); 2) his education/learning (able to quote Latin, understood by educated, literary, male elite); 3) generic affinities with Ovid as opposed to Virgil (as H&L above); blatant piece of self-fashioning; advertising campaign for one.
Source: not just the ‘Ovidian’ (as H&L) but specifically/directly Metamorphoses Book 10 where story of V & A =
story-within-a-story: poet Orpheus is telling a whole series of cautionary tales about love - about how love is invariably accompanied by suffering, jealousy, pain, and so forth - that culminates with the Venus and Adonis story. But important change to source. In Ovid, Adonis may not heed Venus’s advice but there is no suggestion that he doesn’t return her advances, no hint that he isn’t willingly her partner in love. As Ovid tells it - and, indeed, in classical mythology more generally – V & A are lovers. The tragedy of the story is not that Venus doesn’t get Adonis but rather that she loses him. It is Shakespeare, therefore, who introduces the idea that Adonis = coy, maidenly, bashful, and sexually inexperienced. Effect of this change = to make the poem about one big non-event, something that doesn’t happen. Adonis doesn’t have what it takes: he can’t and won’t satisfy Venus sexually putting his absence/failure/lack right in the centre of the frame – see handout. Another effect = to make for an obvious role reversal in which it is now the woman who pursues the man and not vice versa (every man’s fantasy?). Woman = masculinised, man = feminised. See handout.
Venus: goes through all the motions of the sonnet lover who begs his cold and indifferent mistress to look at him, to show him favour; tells Adonis that she is wooing him as Mars, the god of war, once wooed her; acts as the sexual predator/aggressor, eg see eagle metaphor on handout; she approaches Adonis as a “bold-fac’d suitor” (line 6), and her state of rampant sexual arousal is explicitly masculinised, the rush of blood to her face might just as well be an erection. She accosts him with “hard embracing” (line 559): big, red, and hard, crazed nymphomaniac = Venus the penis.
Adonis: by contrast, = feminised: is girlish in the extreme. He takes on all the characteristics of the traditional sonnet-mistress - cold, indifferent, sexually fastidious. Instead of brandishing a heroic phallus in the ‘lists of love’, his body is full of orifices, concavities and indentations: see his dimples, mouth, wounds (handout). Indeed, it’s almost as if Adonis is never a man: if he can’t get it up in life, then he doesn’t even have what it takes in death. The pointed javelin he uses to spear the boar turns out - like everything else pointed in his possession - to be useless. Instead, the boar penetrates him by goring him in the groin, ie. symbolically castrating him. When Venus foresees Adonis’ grisly end, she visualizes it in explicitly sexual terms (handout) – Adonis as deflowered virgin.
Porn: however, as with H&L, does this pornographic gender-bending in fact re-assert masculinist values & a patriarchal agenda? For all her explicit (and hilarious) masculinisation, Venus is still categorically feminine insofar as her very desire signals her as lacking the phallus: indeed, her increasing frustration at this lack not being filled spells out the old masculinist fantasy that a) a man is what every woman wants (and the only thing that will satisfy/complete her) and b) that she is a ‘woman’ because she lacks the phallus. You could therefore argue that this – highly ‘conservative’, ‘traditional’ view of gender roles – thoroughly counteracts/cancels any representation of Adonis as unmanly, a failure, etc.