Representation and Illusion in the Elegies of Théodore de Bèze

In 1548, before his conversion to Protestantism, Théodore de Bèze published a collection of Latin poetry containing a book of twelve elegies written in imitation of Ovid. He would later disown his youthful love poems as frivolous, and his Catholic and Lutheran opponents would gleefully cite them as evidence of his moral and theological bankruptcy. This article proposes first to read the poems on their own terms, as a thoroughly Ovidian collection. Bèze’s elegiac persona, like that of his model Ovid, is fascinated by the reflective and distorting properties of words, and his manipulations and evasions constantly tease the reader with glimpses of an elusive self. The article also sets the Elegies in the context of the theological polemic that arose around them, and poses the question of whether these poems, highly literary contrivances that they are, ought to be taken as seriously as Bèze’s religious opponents wanted them to be. It argues that Bèze’s elaborations of the characteristically Ovidian elegiac themes of the duplicity of language, the unreliability of perceptions, and the play of absence and presence do indeed seem to anticipate anxieties about representation of the self that would become a feature of later Protestant writing.