This volume ends fittingly with an envoy by Lynn Enterline that highlights the resonance between the end of Ovid's Metamorphoses and the figure of Echo. Echo is representative of the epic's thematic transformation of thwarted signification into erotic narratives that disturb the alignment of masculinity and authorial agency. The envoy is fitting both because Enterline's previous work on Ovid and humanist pedagogy is a touchstone for many contributors and because the poetics of repetition that Echo (dis)embodies is frequently evident in the connections that emerge between their chapters.
By far the most dispiriting of the echoes Enterline describes is the status of Ovid's Ars Amatoria as an unironic manual among right-wing pickup artists online. What a contrast such violent misreading makes to the cunning acts of compilation, translation, and occasional conflation that compose The flores of Ovide de arte amandi, printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1513 and carefully analyzed in a chapter by M. L. Stapleton. This text, geared to double translation in the schoolroom, crafts Ovidian sententiae so as to fashion young gentlemen through precepts of practical mastery largely abstracted from the context of seduction. In that setting, those adages that (somewhat puzzlingly, as Stapleton acknowledges) retain their sexual application have their cynical edge exposed and undermined by juxtaposition. Would that this were the version penetrating the “manosphere” (296).
Several chapters treat Ovid's Orpheus. Jenny Mann reveals tensions in the cultural commonplace of Orpheus as civilizer: to what extent does figuring this work of civilization as softening (of stones and savagery) queer the masculine values of humanist rhetorical education? The question has political repercussions (is rhetoric effeminizing in non-democratic situations?) and prosodic consequences: Mann suggests that Marlowe's versions of the Amores use softness to represent in English metrical qualities of Latin elegy otherwise lost in translation. Catherine Bates's agile account of the Metamorphoses as an epic transgressing all categories, including masculine/feminine binaries, also draws attention to the different valences of Orpheus for rhetoricians and poets and shows a similar set of contradictions around Ovid's Apollo, homosexuality and heterosexuality, and ordered and unruly utterance. Her essay concludes by positing that Shakespeare's sonnets are crucially Ovidian not through local allusions but through a shared quality of gender-confounding, pre-categorical abjection, sustained across the entire sequence.
Shakespearean poetry features elsewhere too. John Garrison reads the allusion to Mars and Venus's affair in Venus and Adonis as presenting a positive pacifist masculinity available through Ovid and Lucretius. Sarah Carter places this poem in the homosocial and intertextual context of the Elizabethan vogue for Ovidian epyllia. Returning to Orpheus, Ian Frederick Moulton provides an illuminating discussion of literary and biographical contexts for the pederastic Orpheus in Poliziano's Orfeo, placing the doubly tragic Orpheus (wife lost, body torn) at the birth of Renaissance tragedy. An opening survey of Milton's allusions to Orpheus, however, in which the homoerotic context is perhaps tenuously discernible only in L'Allegro (and without influence from Poliziano), feels like a forced concession to the volume's English focus.
The essays handle the perennial balancing act between scholarly groundwork and literary analysis well. Exemplary in this respect is Melissa Sanchez's reading of Sappho in Ovid's Heroides and Donne's “Sappho to Philaenis” as opening a perspective upon “the cessation of love as other than blameworthy or tragic” (160). Wide, brisk reference to feminism, queer theory, and race enrich the idea that these poems pose the subversive option that these Ovidian lovers can just move on. Similarly stimulating is Eric Song's reading of Ovid's experiment in happy endings—Philemon and Baucis in the Metamorphoses—into Raphael's visit to Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost. Milton partly frees himself from Biblical and theological bondage to atonement through bloodshed by evoking Ovidian hospitality without sacrifice. The scene foreshadows Adam's postlapsarian demotion from dynast and patriarch of Eden, but in a positive way. Sacrifice will be a problem for the text's other Father.
The editors, Garrison and Goran Stanivukovic, disclaim comprehensiveness, but the twelve studies they have gathered and framed between their energizing introduction and Enterline's envoy do fine justice to the myriad and protean representations of masculinity engendered by Ovid's works in the English Renaissance.
