Chapter 10 - Latin Style and Late Elizabethan Poetry

Summary

Critics have long recognized that the Elizabethan minor epic or 'erotic epyllion', dealing largely with mythological love affairs and including Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, form a coherent generic cluster and testify to an intense albeit apparently rather short-lived literary vogue. This chapter argues that the general critical determination to understand these poems as Ovidian has ignored that their distinctive style is quite unlike that of Ovid. It locates these poems instead within a wider category of medium-length mythological narrative verse in both Latin and English, unified by asensuous and ecphrastic style as well as shared features, including stock characters (such as Venus, Proserpina and Glaucus) and set pieces (such as the ‘Garden of Venus’ motif). Latin examples precede the first English instances, and, where studied at all, have been variously described as epyllia and epithalamia, but have almost never been discussed in relation to the English genre. The chapter argues that the Elizabethan English epyllion of the 1590s functioned as a proxy for formal epithalamia, which, due to the Queen's age and lack of an heir, largely disappeared in England in this decade.