The Metamorphosis of Ovid: From Chaucer to Ted Hughes (review)

Near the middle of Ovid's Metamorphoses, the river god Achelous outlines a typology of transformation for the hero Theseus:

             there are those whose forms, once changed, forevermore remain in their new state; others there are for whom continual transformation is the rule. . . .

(8.728–30; Charles Martin trans.)

Western art, literature, and music provide ample evidence that Ovid and his poem themselves fall in the latter category. In the work under review, Sarah Annes Brown considers the changes rung by English poets (and by an occasional prose writer) from Chaucer through Ted Hughes. The result is, as she puts it, a series of "snapshots of English Ovidianism."

Why were so many English poets attracted to Ovid's masterpiece, and to what features of that work were they attracted? Brown begins her attempt to answer these questions by isolating a set of distinctive characteristics—aesthetic detachment; vivid depictions of passion (specifically, of "nonstandard" sexuality) and violence; wit, including linguistic play and a love of the incongruous; and a self-reflexivity manifested in such themes as the nature of fiction, art's relationship with nature, and a fascination with artists both human and divine. She is careful to distinguish between classical mythology in general, and the myths Ovid tells; not every myth, not even every metamorphosis, is Ovidian.

In this considerably expanded version of her 1994 Bristol dissertation treating Chaucer through Milton, Brown demonstrates impressive control of a vast amount of primary and secondary material. Her bibliography documents this mastery, but the chapters themselves are "lightly annotated." Quotations are cited parenthetically; the handful of footnotes contains subsidiary comment, not citation. Occasionally I missed more thorough documentation, but Brown's decision to err on the side of readability was wise; otherwise her book would have been clogged with annotation, given the vast libraries of scholarship devoted to virtually all the authors she includes.

After defining "Ovidianism," Brown aims to establish a continuous Ovidian tradition. To this end, she examines Chaucer (The House of Fame); Spenser (The Faerie Queene); Shakespeare (A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest, and briefly, in a later chapter, The Taming of the Shrew); Andrew Marvell (chiefly "Under Appleton House"); Milton (Paradise Lost); the several contributors to Sir Samuel Garth's 1717 translation; and Keats ("Ode on a Grecian Urn"). Beginning with Chapter 9 she primarily focuses on a "darkening" of the Pygmalion theme, in the Victorians Thomas Lovell Beddoes ("Pygmalion") and Browning (The Ring and the Book); the modernists Joyce ("The Dead" and all of the novels), Eliot ("A Game of Chess" from The Waste Land), and H.D. ("Pygmalion" and Her); and Virginia Woolf (Orlando). A final chapter brings us through the end of the last century, with a discussion of Ted Hughes (Tales from Ovid) and others.

Specialists on any of these authors may quibble about specifics, but overall Brown's case is persuasive, and makes one curious about Ovidianism in other national literatures. All of her chapters contain nuggets of insight on both Ovid and the English writer(s) under discussion. Her remarks about Spenser's Ovidian ekphrases rebut C.S. Lewis' claims about that poet's supposed antipathy to the artificial. Her discussion of Shakespeare necessarily covers familiar territory, but it is a surprise to find Milton here. To appropriate a pagan writing about pagan gods, Milton employs strategies of "splitting" and "doubling" of Ovidian episodes; for example, the Olympian council called by Jupiter in Book 1 is split in Paradise Lost between similar meetings in heaven and hell; the longest section of this chapter is a fascinating treatment of elements from Vertumnus and Pomona in Milton's Adam and Eve. Brown's handling of Beddoes's "Pygmalion" will probably serve to introduce most of her readers to this Victorian. Woolf's Orlando is far better known, but Brown's approach to it is novel, finding Ovidian intertexts in Apollo and Daphne (for the division of the sexes) and Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (for their...