Serious Play: Desire and Authority in the Poetry of Ovid, Chaucer, and Ariosto (review)

Robert Hanning’s engaging, playful, and, despite protestations to the contrary, serious monograph on the seriocomic mode of Ovidian, Chaucerian, and Ariostan narrative begins with a rhetorical gesture that, given the book’s impish muse, should not be taken at face value. Because it lacks the rigor of exhaustive engagement with critical scholarship, Hanning reasons, “This is not a scholarly work” (xii).

True, the book is a vade mecum that originated as the Schoff Lectures at Columbia University in the fall of 2005. With an argument that is neither linear nor doggedly polemical, it reads with the serendipity of an oral venue. Hanning moves from passage to passage, historical moment to historical moment, delivering insights as provocations to further thought in general preference to deductive conclusions. Its English translations of Ovid’s Latin affect a colloquial New Yorkese (“Me mi-serum” = “Oy vey” [16]) that might seem whimsical for an academic tome were it not for a tonal trueness to the urbane antiestablishmentarianism of the Augustan original. Rather than in sustained argument, coherence resides in that wit and political temper with a hint of fang peculiar to Ovid’s humor.

The very fact that this book is being reviewed in a scholarly journal, however, suggests that its publishers at least see it as occupying a niche between the academic and trade markets, albeit without the pomp and bluster of Greenblatt or Bloom. They are correct. Its audience, like that of the Ars amatoria, is the rare amateur of great books, someone acquainted with the complete corpus of Chaucer and undaunted by the 39,000 lines of the Orlando furioso. That could mean simply a literate reader, or more likely a student—undergraduate or graduate—of classical influence and the rhetorical tradition looking for a path through the Middle Ages to the early modern. In this light, Hanning’s opening disavowal should be construed as a recusatio, that throroughly Ovidian topos of introduction by which an author dismisses the stuffy authority of his enterprise in order to forge a more casual camaraderie with his reader.

At one hundred pages, Chapter 1, entitled “Ovid’s Amatory Poetry,” is the longest of the three. It serves as the book’s backbone and index of intertextuality. Here Hanning sets for himself the task of defining Ovid’s protean personae as they evolve from the supine postures of the Amores into the pseudoscientific didacticism of the Ars amatoria’s magister amoris. In so doing, he traces a hermeneutic fiducial along which to align Chaucer’s and Ariosto’s later Ovidianism. The center of Ovid’s irony, according to Hanning, is “the behavior and the fantasies of certain elite segments of Augustan Roman society” (23), the comic hypocrisy of hot pants in high places that reveals “inevitable contradictions between political and personal agendas” (91). Augustus Caesar is the prime target of this hypocrisy and Hanning diligently, and rightly, builds a poetico-political argument for Ovidian erotic irony on Augustus’s Julian Laws of 18–17 bce that regulated marriage and criminalized adultery among the patricians, and threatened the love poetry that satirized (promulgated?) such sexual license. Hanning notes the irony of Augustus’s own sexual license reported by Suetonius, although he might have mentioned, as Macrobius does, the fact that both Augustus’s daughter and granddaughter were prosecuted under these same laws. More important, he highlights the politically subversive edge to Ovid’s irony that may well have gotten him banished, but certainly provided a model for medieval and early modern textual subversions. Along the way, Hanning explores a series of crucial cultural dichotomies such as otium versus negotium. The urban cultus that Hanning had defined earlier in his career in an influential article reappears in relation to the idea of decorum or suitability in a series of finely turned close readings. Now and again, he pauses to gloss pivotal poetic terms such as membra and magister. Taken alone, this...