Blackwell Reference Online

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In 1589, Thomas Lodge published Scylla's Metamorphosis, a narrative Ovidian tale about tragic love and metamorphic transformation told in appropriately domesticated circumstances on the banks of the Isis. Clearly the piece touched a vibrant vein in the artistic air of the times as the next decade or so saw an outburst of erotic metamorphic poems on subjects derived from Ovid and older Greek models. These dealt with the love games of mythological gods, nymphs and mortals, the delights of watching and touching beautiful bodies, the consummation of sex or the impossibility of it, and with a final (more often than not tragic) transformation into a natural form, plant or animal. Outstanding examples of the genre, known as epyllion (minor epic), are Christopher Marlowe's Hero and Leander (published 1598) and Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis (published 1593). Though not metamorphic in the strict sense, George Chapman's Ovid's Banquet of Sense (1595) can also be related to this group, because of its classical narrative and stylistic features. This witty fluid poem, where metamorphosis is a structural principle rather than a narrative event, has been long committed by criticism to the realm of the philosophically inscrutable and has only lately made a comeback as the lively, erudite and ironical piece which it is.The aristocratic vogue for exquisite voyeuristic narratives was mediated through ... log in or subscribe to read full text