Renaissance Forum: Volume 6, Number 2, Winter 2003: Amina Alyal

Raphael Lyne. 2001. Ovid's Changing Worlds: English Metamorphoses 1567-1632. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 303 pp. ISBN 0 19 818704 1. Ł40.

Ever since Stephen Gosson attacked poets as unreliable shapeshifters (The Schoole of Abuse, 1579), poetry and the Metamorphoses have had a tense and yet productive relationship in the work of poets and critics alike. Raphael Lyne reassesses two translations of the Metamorphoses alongside two texts that are inspired by it. He thus suggestively aligns translation and imitation, reflecting on the creative qualities of each. Lyne interestingly extends the work on Ovidian imitation, already established for example by Jonathan Bate in Shakespeare's Ovid (1993) and Charles Martindale in Ovid Renewed (1988), by considering the context of patriotism. Translation is seen as 'self-assertion' (3) and 'a patriotic project' (4), in a way that recalls the campaign for English excellence championed by Renaissance writers as diverse as George Puttenham and Thomas Campion. The book is in four chapters, each taking as its subject a single Ovidian text of the Renaissance, with a postscript on Shakespeare, whose use of Ovid in The Merry Wives of Windsor, for example, evokes an English folkloric countryside, where 'metamorphosis is replaced by dressing up' (269). The book is helpfully laid out, with cohesive sections within each chapter, which often look at quite different aspects of the text and author under scrutiny.
Chapter 1 examines Arthur Golding's translation of the Metamorphoses (1565), in which he takes up J.F. Nim's editorial comment that Golding makes Ovid a 'ruddy English gentleman' (27). Lyne's conclusions are more or less that he does, although he argues that this is part of a coherent project that 'naturalizes Ovidian tales' (78). There is some learned work on dialect and local colour, and close scrutiny of Ovid and Golding to reveal contemporary references to religious controversy. Lyne avoids seeing Golding's Alexandrines as the 'doggerel' so berated by Sidney and others; here Golding's work produces cadences of Englishness at odds with the fashion of his day for Classical imitation – Lyne's Golding is ahead of his time.
Chapter 2 sees The Faerie Queene as another Ovidian text, not just in its reference to specific tales but in its preoccupation with the theme of change. This raises profound reflections on the nature of writing itself as an always unfinished process of change. The sections look at different sorts of metamorphosis in the work – suggesting a texture 'where one story slips out of another' (118), together with 'structured allusions' (113) and 'non-metamorphosis' (129), where metamorphosis is evoked but not actual. Lyne sees 'Spenser's manipulation of the intersections between simile, metaphor, and metamorphosis' (138) as evading closure; the endlessness reflects Spenser's 'sadness' (141) at the constant presence of change.
Chapter 3 explores Poly-Olbion, where Drayton is Ovidian partly because of his Bloomian relationship with Spenser. Lyne argues that Drayton's antagonism towards Ovid is woven into his attempts to write about metamorphosis in an epic historical form. The classical gods' 'frank assaults and constant infringements [. . .] are discordant presences in the Elizabethan scene' (169), and Drayton identifies with the 'ventriloquized' (170) females of epic perhaps because they suggestively reflect his own sense of being 'predetermined' (170) by the Classical form. Drayton's nymphs and spirits inhabit an English landscape but are quintessentially Ovidian, Lyne argues, and Drayton's appeal to vague semi-legendary 'bards' sees the poet as squaring up to the Classics, '[t]ransforming his debt to a classical poet into an allegiance to a conveniently lost native tradition' (197). Thus literary history itself is metamorphosed.
Perhaps the strongest chapter is 4, which brings in new cross-currents with that 'double stranger' (221), Sandys's translation of Ovid, in which ancient Rome and the New World generate a Caroline English text. Since Lyne has already considered mapping the world in Ovid and Drayton's map of Britain, the shift of perspective to the Virginian colonies in this chapter is all the more exhilarating. Sandys's translation, so overshadowed by Golding's as the Renaissance Metamorphoses, deserves this space. Sandys's translation is stirring and economical, lyrical and terse, a delight, which Lyne brings alive in his readings of it. There is a lively and energetic section on etymology, on changing usage and literary coinage, particularly concentrating on the Latinisms of Sandys's style. An enthusiasm for words is irresistibly conveyed, bringing to dictionary definition fruitful reflections on the contextual currents that contribute to semantics and style.
Another section considers the cultural Virginian context: since Greenblatt we have been taught to read the New World as a signifier for European imperialism but Lyne quarrels with that, bringing us material that is rather later in date than those much-explored voyagers, Hakluyt and Harriot. He uncovers Sandys's restrained incorporation of traveller's tales and his own travel experiences into his writings. There is a section is devoted to Sandys's own commentary on his work, which shows surprisingly little reflection on how his Virginian sojourn might have affected (or indeed effected) his readings of Ovid, and Lyne concludes that little impact was made on the European world picture by the New World. Ruddy Englishness may not be apparent in Sandys, but Lyne grounds that difference historically, in that the Caroline period had more certainty about the legitimacy of English than in Golding's rough-hewn early and uncertain days. That seems to anticipate the assured neoclassicism of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Some reflections on Sandys's Latinate style make an elegant return (in a most Spenserian way) to the book's own beginnings, but one which opens up new possibilities rather than closing the subject down.
Lyne considers etymology in a way that shows how it is not just narratives that are Ovidian, but words themselves, which exist in a continual process of translation, or transmutation. This book makes a significant contribution to Renaissance scholarship, alive as it is to recent and past debates in the field. Two critical traditions inform the work: imitation of the Classics scrutinized in formal, literary terms, and cultural materialist studies of the rise of Englishness as a nationalistic concept, such as those of Richard Helgerson (Forms of Nationhood, 1988) and Andrew Hadfield (Literature, Politics and National Identity, 1994). Ovid's Changing Worlds advances both.

AMINA ALYAL
TRINITY AND ALL SAINTS COLLEGE, LEEDS