Books
MARLOWE'S OVID: THE "ELEGIES" IN THE MARLOWE CANON (2014)
The first book of its kind, Marlowe's Ovid explores and analyzes in depth the relationship between the Elegies--Marlowe's translation of Ovid's Amores-- and Marlowe's own dramatic and poetic works. The book carefully considers Marlowe's Elegies in the context of his seven known dramatic works and his epyllion, Hero and Leander, and offers a different way to read Marlowe. The study employs Marlowe's rendition of the Amores as a way to read his seven dramatic productions and his narrative poetry while engaging with previous scholarship devoted to the accuracy of the translation and to bibliographical issues. Four main principles inform the analysis: the intertextual relationship of the Elegies to the rest of the author's canon; its reflection of the influence of Erasmian humanist pedagogy, imitatio and aemulatio; its status as the standard English Amores until the Glorious Revolution, part of the larger phenomenon of pan-European Renaissance Ovidianism; its participation in the genre of the sonnet sequence. He explores how translating the Amores into the Elegies profited Marlowe as a writer, a kind of literary archaeology that explains why he may have commenced such an undertaking. Marlowe's Ovid adds to the body of scholarly work in a number of subfields, including classical influences in English literature, translation, sexuality in literature, early modern poetry and drama, and Marlowe and his milieu.
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE THE CRAFTSMAN: LIVES, STAGE, AND PAGE (2010)
Contributions to this volume explore the idea of Marlowe as a working artist, in keeping with John Addington Symonds' characterization of him as a "sculptor-poet." Throughout the body of his work-including not only the poems and plays, but also his forays into translation and imitation-a distinguished company of established and emerging literary scholars traces how Marlowe conceives an idea, shapes and refines it, then remakes and remodels it, only to refashion it further in his writing process. These essays necessarily overlap with one another in the categories of lives, stage, and page, which signals their interdependent nature regarding questions of authorship, theater and performance history, as well as interpretive issues within the works themselves. The contributors interpret and analyze the disputed facts of Marlowe's life, the textual difficulties that emerge from the staging of his plays, the critical investigations arising from analyses of individual works, and their relationship to those of his contemporaries. The collection engages in new ways the controversies and complexities of its subject's life and art. It reflects the flourishing state of Marlowe studies as it shapes the twenty-first century conception of the poet and playwright as master craftsman.
SPENSER'S OVIDIAN POETICS (2009)
No history of the longstanding critical tradition of exploring the Spenser-Ovid relationship has been written. This book constructs such a critical history: the annotations of E. K. in The Shepheardes Calender (1579), the Enlightenment editions of The Faerie Queene, the philological mode of the Spenser Variorum (1932-57), and the recent, innovative work of Harry Berger and Colin Burrow. Aside from occasional articles, no truly comprehensive analysis of their kinship as love poets exists, either. The author explores Spenser's emulation of Ovid's amatory poetics. His humanist education trained him to find or construct analogues and etiological patterns in classical texts. Therefore, his early study of translation, intensive reading, and "versifying" as an interrelated process guaranteed a densely allusive, metamorphic Ovidian poetics as a natural result.
ADMIRED AND UNDERSTOOD: THE POETRY OF APHRA BEHN (2004)
Admired and Understood analyzes Behn's only pure verse collection, Poems upon Several Occasions (1684), and situates her in her literary milieu as a poet. Behn's book demonstrates her desire for acceptance in her literary culture, to be admired and understood, as she puts it, the antitheses of what many surmise from reading her other works--that she saw herself primarily as a guerrilla critic of her culture's views on race, class, and gender. The introduction argues that her colleagues thought of her as poet first, rather than as a dramatist, reviews current criticism about Behn, and provides a brief overview of late seventeenth-century poetical theory. The first chapter explains the intricately interwoven structure of Behn's collection. The next two chapters concern intertextual linkages between Behn and Abraham Cowley, as well as the influence of Thomas Creech's translations of Horace, Theocritus, and Lucretius on her poetics. The ensuing explore Behn's response to Rochester's libertine aesthetic, a close reading of "On a Juniper-Tree" (a poem central to her collection), Katherine Philips as Behn's most important predecessor as a woman writing, and her place in Carolean culture.
FATED SKY: THE FEMINA FURENS IN SHAKESPEARE (2000)
Fated Sky explores direct and unmistakable intertextual connections between Seneca His Tenne Tragedies and the angry woman in Shakespeare's plays. It begins with broad analogues of rhetoric and character and proceeds to direct verbal echoes and allusions that reveal how many variations Shakespeare worked on this pattern, acts of creation dependent entirely on the dramatic situation in a particular play. The introduction and first chapter discuss the critical history of the controversy concerning Senecan influence on the playwright and argue for the use of the Tenne Tragedies as Shakespeare's intertext. The ensuing chapters extend the idea by explaining the centrality of John Studley's Medea to Shakespeare's conception of Joan la Pucelle (1 Henry V), Margaret of Anjou (2 Henry VI, 3 Henry VI, Richard III), and Tamora (Titus Andronicus); the further transformations of femina furens in The Taming of the Shrew and The Merchant of Venice; the strange parallels between Helena (All's Well that Ends Well) and John Studley's Phaedra; and between Cleopatra and Jasper Heywood's Juno. The last chapter suggests that Imogen and Cymbeline's Queen represent an exorcism of femina furens.
THOMAS HEYWOOD'S "ART OF LOVE": THE FIRST ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF OVID'S "ARS AMATORIA" (2000)
Thomas Heywood (ca 1573-1641) was a major Renaissance playwright who wrote or collaborated on over two hundred plays. Loues Schoole was one of his many nondramatic works that shows his fascination with antiquity. It was the standard English translation of the Ars in the seventeenth century, so popular that it was pirated almost as soon as he had written it--then printed, sold, reprinted, and resold in England and the Netherlands. It was not attributed to him during his lifetime, and he was not allowed to share in the profits that its (considerable) sales generated, two things that rankled him for the rest of his life. This is understandable because it is an excellent translation into English heroic verse, accurate without stuffiness, colloquial without indecorousness. Twenty years after Heywood's death, Loues Schoole was pirated yet again and went to six different editions during the Restoration (1662-84).
The present edition represents the first instance in which the translation has been edited in a scholarly manner. Besides a full Introduction that accounts for the history of Loues Schoole, Ovid in the English Renaissance, and the editorial method, each of the three books of the poem includes a Commentary that provides cross-references within the text; glosses for unusual, archaic, or regional forms peculiar to Heywood's English; annotations from sourcebooks that Heywood used to identify or understand characters from classical history, literature, and mythology; and explanations for any emendations the editor deemed necessary. In his efforts to make the Ars a seventeenth-century poem, Heywood contemporizes Ovid's references to dress, behavior, courtship, marriage, games, theater, agriculture, horsemanship, war, literature --all of which the Commentary explains at great length.
HARMFUL ELOQUENCE: OVID'S "AMORES" FROM ANTIQUITY TO SHAKESPEARE (1996)
Harmful Eloquence traces the influence of the early elegiac poetry of Ovid on European literature from 500-1600 c.e. The Amores served as a classical model for love poetry in the Middle Ages and the early modern period and was a text essential to the formation of fin' Amors, or "courtly love." Medieval Latin poets, the troubadours, Dante, Petrarch, and Shakespeare were all familiar with Ovid in his various forms, and all depended greatly upon his Amores in composing their cansos, canzoniere, and sonnets. The book begins with a detailed analysis of Ovid's group of elegies and their artistic unity. It moves on to explain the fragmentary transmission of the Amores in the Latin Anthology and the cohesion of the fragments into the conventions of Medieval Latin and troubadour poetry. Two subsequent chapters explain the use of the Amores, its narrator, and the conventions of fin' Amors int he poetry of both Dante and Petrarch. The final chapter concentrates on Shakespeare's reprocessing and parody of this material in his sonnets in light of Christopher Marlowe's translation of Ovid's sequence, All Ovids Elegies. Harmful Eloquence analyzes the intertextual transmission of the Amores in major medieval and Renaissance love poetry for the first time.
"Marlowe's Translations of Ovid and Lucan." In Marlowe at 450. Edited by Sara M. Deats and Robert A. Logan (2015).
"Marlovian Residue in Jonson's Poetaster." Early Modern Literary Studies 23 (2014).
"The Nose Plays: "Ovid in The Jew of Malta." In The Jew of Malta: A Critical Reader. Edited by Robert A. Logan (2013).
"Marlowe's First Ovid: Certaine of Ovids Elegies." In Christopher Marlowe the Craftsman (2010).
"Edmund Spenser, George Turberville, and Isabella Whitney Read Ovid's Heroides." Studies in Philology 105 (2008).
"Devoid of Guilty Shame: Ovidian Tendencies in Spenser's Erotic Poetry." Modern Philology 105 (2007).
"'I of old contemptes complayne': Margaret of Anjou and English Seneca." Comparative Literature Studies 43 (2006).
"Making the Woman of Him: Shakespeare's Man Right Fair as Sonnet Lady." Texas Studies in Literarure and Language 46 (2004).
"A Remedy for Heywood?" Texas Studies in Literature and Language 43 (2001).
[Introduction] [Text and Commentary]
"'Thou art exact of taste': The Ars amatoria as Intertext in Paradise Lost." Comparative Literature Studies 36 (1999).
"'Loue my lewd Pilot': The Ars amatoria in The Faerie Queene." Texas Studies in Literature and Language (1998).
"'He nothing common did or mean': Marvell's Charles I and Horace's non humilis mulier." English Language Notes (1993).
"Nashe and the Poetics of Obscenity: The Choise of Valentines." Classical and Modern Literature 12 (1991).