Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

It is hard to imagine what the shape of English Renaissance literature might be, if Tudor and Stuart writers and readers had listened to the advice of moral reformers and shunned Ovid. The classical poet's deep learning and eloquence made him vital to the development of English letters, but his sensual and pagan muse posed obvious dangers. If the ‘inticing rimes’ of ‘sweet-lipt Ovid’ could ‘forc[e] attention’ and wonder even from sage and serious readers, how could women and schoolboys (seen as impressionable readers) withstand his seductive appeal (Beaumont 1602: Sig. A3v–4r)? Nonetheless, Ovid's admirers weighed his learning, eloquence, and wit against the wanton, vain, and trifling elements of his verse and came to one conclusion: there had to be a way to retain his gifts to poetry without succumbing to his charms and repeating his moral errors. But how?Schoolmasters opted for selective reading: Ovid's poetry could be safely mined for its models of eloquence and knowledge of ancient myth and custom. In this view, Ovid's verse was comparable to a garden, replete with rhetorical ‘flowers’ that one might pluck from context and arrange at will. Schoolboys were trained from early days to read for the beauties of his language: they parsed, memorized, and adapted lines of his verse, leaving questions of interpretation to the schoolmaster, who provided moral lessons from time to time. ... log in or subscribe to read full text