Marlowe’s Ovid: The Elegies in the Marlowe Canon by M. L. Stapleton (review)

Christopher Marlowe’s ‘Ovidian poetics’ is the subject of Marlowe’s Ovid, with M. L. Stapleton using Marlowe’s Elegies – his translation of Ovid’s Amores – to ‘read’ the seven plays and Hero and Leander. The book engages with studies of Marlowe, but also with ones of classical influence, translation, and sexuality.

In particular, Stapleton challenges Patrick Cheney’s view in Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession: Ovid, Spenser, Counter-Nationhood (University of Toronto Press, 1997) that Marlowe sought a professional career path based on Ovid’s progression from love poetry to tragedy to epic, in deliberate contrast to Spenser’s Virgilian course. Stapleton sees Ovid’s influence differently, identifying the process of translating the Amores as the key to Marlowe’s development as a writer. Ovid’s Amores is a series of poems about love affairs, using the persona of a young man, the desultor or ‘inconstant lover’ (the term originally referred to a circus rider who leapt from one horse to another), who reveals himself to be passionate, certainly, but also selfish, amoral, misogynistic, and self-deluded, with an ‘ambitious ranging mind’ (Elegies 2.4.48). Marlowe’s Elegies is notable as the first substantial vernacular translation of the Amores – moreover, the standard English translation until 1688 – and the first extended use of the heroic couplet. One version was nevertheless ordered to be burnt by the bishops in 1599.

Stapleton’s analysis of the relationship between the Elegies and Marlowe’s other works includes detailed exploration of intertextual instances of verbal correspondences and allusions. More importantly, he argues that the experience of translating provided training in the craft of writing, a preparation for Marlowe’s career as playwright and narrative poet. Practice in converting Ovid’s dramatic monologues, with their emotional nuances and continually changing perspectives, fostered an ability to ‘inhabit and develop’ dramatic characters (p. 30).

Elements of the desultor’s character resurface in the hyperbole and insensitivity of Tamburlaine, the self-delusion of Faustus, Edward, and Dido, and the cynicism and dissembling of the various Machiavels (Barabas, Gaveston, Mortimer). Characters are consistently undermined, their faults (whether dissembling, amorality, misogyny, or disorderly sexuality) pitilessly exposed. Indeed, Marlowe’s writings, like Ovid’s, may delight in presenting ‘emotionally bizarre perspectives’, but these can obscure ‘a rather steely core of conventional morality that belies his somewhat fanciful critical reputation as a rebel, transgressor, and underminer of tradition’ (p. 151). Stapleton’s Marlowe invests his energies, not in subversion, but in his craft.