Thomas Heywood and the classical tradition

Tania Demetriou, Janice Valls-Russell, Tania Demetriou, Janice Valls-Russell

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781526140234
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526140258
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

This volume offers the first in-depth investigation of Thomas Heywood's engagement with the classics. Its introduction and twelve essays trace how the classics shaped Heywood's work in a variety of genres across a writing career of over forty years, ranging from drama, epic and epyllion, to translations, compendia and the design of a warship for Charles I. Close readings demonstrate the influence of a capaciously conceived classical tradition that included continental editions and translations of Latin and Greek texts, early modern mythographies and the medieval tradition of Troy. They attend to Heywood's thought-provoking imitations and juxtapositions of these sources, his use of myth to interrogate gender and heroism, and his turn to antiquity to celebrate and defamiliarise the theatrical or political present. Heywood's better-known works are discussed alongside critically neglected ones, making the collection valuable for undergraduates and researchers alike.

1

Intertextuality and Thomas Heywood’s early Ovid: Oenone and Paris

Katherine Heavey

On 17 May 1594, an anonymous poem entitled Oenone and Paris was entered in the Stationers’ Register. The poem, bearing a preface signed by T. H., has long been attributed to Thomas Heywood. Joseph Quincy Adams cites various evidence in support of the ‘fair probability’ that T. H. is Heywood, including the obvious classical learning of the two authors, their common admiration for Ovid and Lucian as well as Shakespeare, their interest in the Troy story in particular and the various echoes of Oenone and Paris in Heywood’s later works.¹ An epyllion set after the Trojan prince Paris’ first meeting with Helen, Oenone and Paris recounts his invented return to Ida, and the hopeless attempts of the nymph Oenone, Paris’ first love, to reattract his interest, before he leaves to be reunited with Helen. Damned in the eyes of many critics for what Adams has termed its ‘unblushing plagiarism’ of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1593),² but owing just as much to classical poetry, T. H.’s epyllion inventively reshapes its Ovidian and Shakespearean source material, incorporating further details from Lucian, Colluthus and earlier Elizabethan Troy-stories along the way. In this chapter, I will show that Oenone and Paris merits new attention, not only because it appears to be one of Heywood’s earliest experimentations with an Ovidian source text, but also because it moves beyond this source in a variety of intriguing ways, demonstrating the complex and inventive intertextuality, and the interest in readers and reception, which would come to characterise Heywood’s more ambitious later classicism.

In his choice of protagonists, T. H. attempts to write himself into a well-established mythic tradition, while also venturing in new directions with his treatment of his characters. Early modern authors and readers would have been most familiar with Paris as a key player in the famous story of the Trojan War. Oenone, meanwhile, was best known as one of the despairing letter-writers of Ovid’s Heroides, and Oenone and Paris is unarguably reflective of what Daniel Moss has usefully termed the ‘Ovidian vogue’ of the 1590s, in its reimagining of one of Ovid’s writing women.³ However, the poem is also remarkable as an adaptive project, one that demonstrates what Moss terms the ‘medieval and early modern impulse to inscribe multiple new identities on the legendary figures of the classical world’.⁴ T. H. is keenly aware that by choosing Oenone and Paris as his subjects, he is not just responding to Ovid, but is also activating his readers’ memories of the story of the Trojan War and offering a revision of that iconic tale. As this would suggest, the poem calls on its readers to be particularly engaged with the myths, as they situate this invented episode in relation to the characters and details they already know from Ovid, Virgil, Homer and early modern sources.

Set before the outbreak of the war, and taking full advantage of what Tania Demetriou has termed ‘the prequel’s literary resource of being automatically read in relation to the known’,⁵ Oenone and Paris provides a new angle on a well-known story, not least by allowing a familiar but traditionally marginalised figure a new kind of power. T. H. permits Oenone to speak (rather than write) back to the man who has abandoned her, and the poem has been noted by critics for its sensitive treatment of its heroine,⁶ and for retelling a familiar story ‘from an unexpected, domestic and feminine, perspective’.⁷ Oenone’s voice is at the heart of the poem, with William Weaver pointing out that she is granted many more lines of dialogue than Paris, and that her speech is more rhetorically elaborate.⁸ Refusing to submit unquestioningly to Paris’ rejection, she is endowed with the complexified voice that Wendy Wall sees as characteristic of the female personae of Renaissance complaint poetry.⁹ At certain moments, as she appeals to Paris, Oenone even enjoys some of the ‘elevation and prestige’ that Leah Whittington has argued can (paradoxically) be enjoyed by a supplicating figure.¹⁰ As Michael L. Stapleton and Janice Valls-Russell trace in chapters 2 and 3 respectively, later mythical works of Heywood’s are equally remarkable for their emphasis on the voices and the ill-fated private relationships of classical women, and, like Oenone and Paris, these works might extend the stories of these women beyond their traditional classical boundaries. For example, in 1 Iron Age (printed 1632), Heywood brings the classical, Ovidian Helen to life onstage. He recycles his own work in the process, for much of her dialogue with Paris is borrowed from Heywood’s earlier translations of Heroides XVI and XVII, which he had interpolated into his 1609 poem Troia Britanica. However, he also departs from Ovid, and from his own earlier work with the poet, and refashions Helen for an early modern audience eager for new addenda to a well-known and scandalous story. For instance, in one unclassical scene, Helen is forced to make an onstage choice between her husband and her lover, in front of an audience composed of Greeks, Trojans and Jacobean theatregoers. T. H.’s focus on the private life of Paris and Oenone, and particularly on Oenone as a character, is a suggestive foreshadowing of Heywood’s later, almost voyeuristic interest in Helen’s psychology, and (more largely) his interest in what happened (or could have happened) before, around and after the familiar classical stories his educated audiences would already have known.¹¹

Mark Bayer has argued that Heywood’s mythic works demonstrate a sophisticated appreciation of the diverse audiences for whom he was writing, and the expectations and interests of these recipients: for example, the audience for a play like The Iron Age might differ appreciably from the readership of his poem Troia Britanica, and Heywood cuts his mythic cloth accordingly.¹² T. H. has also thought carefully about his readership, and their reception of his work, and in the preface to Oenone and Paris he addresses the ‘Gentlemen’ he imagines as constituting this readership. He claims, somewhat defensively, that he presents his creation, ‘the Maiden head of my Pen’, to the judicious critical view of these readers (sig. A2r), so that their assessments may improve his future writing.¹³ If T. H. is sincere in his quest for constructive critique then writing Oenone and Paris might be a good way to achieve this, because the growing popularity of such short mythic poems meant that, by 1594, mythologically inclined readers could compare his efforts to those of other poets, including Shakespeare and Thomas Lodge (Scilla’s Metamorphosis, 1589). The adaptation of Ovidian material (the Heroides) into a pseudo-Ovidian genre (the Elizabethan epyllion) also held other, more practical attractions for an author conscious of what his readership was already consuming for, as Moss puts it, ‘[q]uite simply, Ovidian poetry sold’.¹⁴ Moreover, an ambitious but inexperienced author might be especially drawn to the emerging and evolving form of the epyllion, having seen the success of his predecessors: Götz Schmitz points out that after the publication of Venus and Adonis in 1593 ‘the writing of an epyllion had become something of an obligatory apprentice work for aspiring poets’.¹⁵ As Schmitz’s phrasing suggests, there is perhaps a comfortingly formulaic quality to the epyllion, both for the writer and the reader. Sandra Clark notes that typically, such a poem

combines disparate elements from several genres, is classicising (packed with self-consciously classical references and allusions) and erotic in manner, and devotes itself to an Ovidian-style story of love.¹⁶

Oenone and Paris clearly incorporates such elements, and in so doing reflects the essentially ‘disparate’ nature of this form of poetry.¹⁷ T. H.’s poem gestures to the Elizabethan interest in direct translations of Ovid (and particularly to George Turberville’s successful Heroides of 1567), and to another popular contemporary form of poetry, that of male-authored female complaint, as well as to the period’s broader interest in representations of supplication and appeal.¹⁸ In Oenone and Paris, then, T. H. is able to marry familiarity with fluidity, to blend multiple fashionable Elizabethan forms and tropes with specific classical and early modern intertexts, and to refigure these on his own terms. In its subject-matter, its style and its address to the reader, the poem demonstrates an aspiring author thinking carefully about both his readership and his own approach to mythic writing, and reworking known material of various kinds to meet both the expectations of his imagined audience and his own intellectual and commercial agendas.

T. H.’s poem is, inescapably, a reworking of one popular early modern intertext in particular for, as critics have noticed with disapproval, Oenone and Paris bears an obvious resemblance to Venus and Adonis, and its relationship to the earlier poem is signalled in the clear parallels between characters and in similarities of language.¹⁹ The poem opens with Paris, like Adonis, hunting at daybreak; the reader learns that he has already returned from Greece with Helen, for he has left the bed of his ‘new-stolne bryde’ (line 8) to wander in the woods of Ida. (From here on, numbers in brackets after a quotation – e.g. (8) – are the corresponding line numbers.) He is soon accosted by Oenone, who has learned of Paris’ betrayal (perhaps, as she describes in Heroides V, by seeing Paris and Helen together aboard his ship), and the narrator describes her grief, ‘Her face al swoolne with still distilling teares’ (38). She appr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• A note on the text
• Introduction: Thomas Heywood and ‘the antique world’
• 1 Intertextuality and Thomas Heywood’s early Ovid: Oenone and Paris
• 2 Thomas Heywood’s Loves Schoole: emulation, adaptation, and anachronism
• 3 Rescripting classical stories of rape from page to stage: Lucrece and Callisto
• 4 ‘Interlaced with sundry histories’: the open structure of The Silver Age
• 5 A ‘glorious Greek’? Thomas Heywood and Hercules
• 6 The not-so-classical tradition: mythographic complexities in 1 Iron Age
• 7 Reading the classics, but how? Mythographic paradigms and ‘ill-joined marquetry’
• 8 Compendious poetry: Homer and Ausonius in Thomas Heywood’s Various History Concerninge Women
• 9 ‘The scene lies in Hel’: the world of Lucian in Thomas Heywood’s stage poetry
• 10 Acting like Greeks
• 11 A theatre for the Iron Age: theorising practice in Thomas Heywood’s Ages plays
• 12 The Sovereign of the Seas: Thomas Heywood’s 3D engagement with the classics
• Appendix: Heywood’s works: a chronological table
• Select bibliography
• Index