Desiring Bodies: Ovidian Romance and the Cult of Form (review)

There is much to savour in this excellent volume. With laudable elegance and lexical sophistication, Gregory Heyworth's unique, comparative study soars with ease across the landscape of cultural history in order to bring forth the 'monolithic' Ovidian influence on romance form in a selection of noteworthy medieval and Renaissance authors.

Offering a cultural history whose principal thesis asserts 'an anxiety of flux and metamorphosis in social and generic forms as an existential condition of romance' (p. x), Heyworth's richly textured monograph reconsiders the Ovidian structural principles of corpus and forma, derived from the opening line of the Metamorphoses: 'My mind is bent to tell of forms changed into new bodies' (I.i). Placing under close textual scrutiny a variety of literary sources which may be identified as the genre of romance derived from the Ovidian amatory model, Heyworth's exposition encapsulates six centuries of literary output from Chaucer to Milton (1170 to 1670). This weighty canonical span examines the Lais of Marie de France; Chrétien de Troyes' Cligès and Perceval; Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Rime sparse by Petrarch; Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet; and Milton's Paradise Lost.

With exceptional agility, Heyworth's volume captures the powerful resonance of the Latin poet's voice through the ages, asserting the primacy of Ovid as an author 'whose literary corpus is indelibly inscribed in the bedrock of European culture' (p. 1). This assertion is most particularly evidenced in the meticulous discussion of metamorphic principles in a body of literature, commencing in the Middle Ages, that was itself in a state of fluidity and innovative linguistic and structural development, influenced by the socioeconomic and political imperatives of the day.

The emergence of the rising mercantile class witnessed the erosion of the feudal notion of the three orders of society, which posited a tripartite functional division based on agricultural labour, the military life and the religious life of prayer. Heyworth's diachronic study envisages mutability of form as an all-pervasive process in the output of the magister amoris and confidently traces its uncanny influence. Thus Part I of the volume, 'The Sociology of Romance', addresses socio-political and economic culture in romance, while Part II, 'Romance Form and Formality', offers a detailed study of poetic exempla, i.e., the notion of form through the dialectic of the completed work.

Heyworth's commentary in Part I firstly explores Ovidian metatexts in the work of Marie de France, encapsulating the thematics of mutability in texts that explore, for example, medieval initiation rituals, the medieval love-hunt or tales of lycanthropy. Through the work of Chrétien de Troyes, Heyworth identifies the changing face of the ethos of chivalry, while in the Canterbury Tales he evokes the social tensions and chimerical hybridity informing Chaucer's creative impulse. Heyworth's elucidation of 'Ovidian socio-political paradigms' (p. 160), draws the reader deeply into the recesses of romance narrative in order to highlight 'how romance worries the complex unities of social form in metaphors of the body' (p. 179).

The theme of hybridization continues in Part II, in which Petrarch, Shakespeare and Milton are discussed in terms of the influence of the Ovidian corporeal metaphor as a metapoetic device. In the discussion of Petrarch's fashioning of an elegiac romance in the Rime sparse, the absent relationship of the poet with Laura's body is seen as substituted by the 'highly wrought weft' of the book about her. At the same time, Heyworth deftly weaves Orphic correlations into the mix, thereby underscoring the erotic pathos and insufficiency of the lover-poet's quest. More powerfully still, in the chapter entitled 'Playing for Time', in which Heyworth offers a lively analysis of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, there is a persuasive alignment of diverse motifs, for example, the influence of temporal modes and disjunctions, the story of Phäethon, the vocative strategy of falconry and the use...