Comedy and Epyllion in Post-Reformation England

Summary

Two species of comedy particularly disturbed prevailing political and religious mores in Elizabethan England: satire and Ovidian comedy. While the political bite and poisonously bitter aftertaste of satire constituted a pointed assault on the alleged ills of a corrupt society, Ovidian comedy, in contrast, had no agenda. Precisely because it eschewed moral and political purposes in favour of eroticism and myth, Ovidian comedy, although it proved more difficult to contain than satire, was as widely condemned. Purged of all moral and political aims, this striking absence of purpose was perfected in the epyllion, rendering it not only a purer form of comedy, but also a supremely and irreducibly literary one. The argument I will prosecute here is that the epyllion of the 1590s - though it has suffered considerable critical neglect and misapprehension - is a complex and supremely important moment in the history of literary comedy.

William Shakespeare was born a year prior to the publication of Arthur Golding’s The XV Bookes of P. Ouidius Naso, entytuled Metamorphosis . . . (1565). Shaped by an unprecedented manifestation of English Christianity, Shakespeare’s generation went on from an early introduction to Latin authors in the grammar schools to more profound encounters with classical paganism. In what follows, I will examine the absorption and iteration of the Roman poet Ovid in 1590s epyllia that was to be found neither in the decades that preceded it nor in those that were to follow in poetry characterized by a divorce both from didacticism and from immediately political purposes. Marked primarily by its distinctive tone – ebullient, racy, urbane and yet by turns sombre and even tragic – the epyllion’s species of literary sensibility is far closer to Ovid’s subtle modulations of voice in the Latin original than its precursors. In particular, I will argue that the libidinal energy carried by the comedic aspects of the epyllion renders this poetry more wholly and unapologetically literary in our modern sense, and it is so because of a certain complex but inevitable negotiation with Christianity. My bigger if more tentative claim is that the species of Ovidianism that flowers in the 1590s belongs, conceptually speaking, not only in its substance, but also vitally in its comedic expression to the period’s anticipation and, ultimately, its inauguration of a definitively secular modernity.