The Trials of Orpheus by Jenny C. Mann;

Author:Jenny C. Mann;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2021-07-27T00:00:00+00:00

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What man will now take liberal arts in hand,

Or think soft verse in any stead to stand?

—CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, ALL OVIDS ELEGIES (CA. 1599)66

In depicting the language arts in tactile terms (something that can be taken “in hand”), these lines from Marlowe’s translation of Ovid’s Amores betray an Orphic orientation. They thus offer an apt point of entry to examine the construction of an English poetics of softness at the end of the sixteenth century. Ovid’s poem originally inquires, “And does anyone still respect the freeborn arts, or deem tender verse brings any dower?” (Et quisquam ingenuas etiamnunc suspicit artes, / aut tenerum dotes carmen habere putat?). Marlowe’s translation insists on the masculinity of the poet who is invited to act on behalf of what he calls “soft verse.”67 Further, this query (“What man …?”) follows a notorious depiction of male impotence in Elegy 3.6, so it is difficult not to read the call for a male poet to “stand” as anything other than an opportunity to repair the speaker’s recent sexual “disgrace,” when his member “would by no means stand” (Elegies 3.6.83, 3.6.75). But how can a man “stand” up in “soft verse”? Doesn’t softness threaten to undo the very virility required for such masculine self-assertion? Marlowe’s Elegies attempt to fulfill this paradoxical request, drawing on Ovid’s poetry in order to present its readers with a discourse of vernacular poetic invention that does not rely solely on metaphors of virility to ensure its genesis and effects. Rather, Marlowe’s Elegies present “softness” as the very ground of poetic invention.

Marlowe’s assertion of the potency of a soft poetics must be understood in the context of the classical and humanist tradition discussed earlier, which routinely denounces flaccid or nerveless expression, conflating poetic and rhetorical style with approved forms of masculinity. Yet despite the usual deployment of mollis and its cognates as shameful terms for effeminacy, Ovid’s Amores depict the loss of bodily and linguistic vigor as the basis for poetic invention and the model for a formal practice characterized by the adjective “soft” (mollis) and its synonyms. Ovid’s elegies toy with the mollis/nervosus, or effeminate/virile, opposition outlined in theories of classical oratory and poetry; indeed, they exemplify the stylistic and thematic concerns censured as effeminate by classical and humanist moralists alike.68 As a translator, Marlowe confronts a further paradox, for he has to accommodate the malleable qualities of Ovid’s “tender measures” (teneris … modis) to his own early modern English vernacular, a language notorious for its barren vocabulary, harsh monosyllables, and unyielding grammar (Amores 2.1.4). How can one write “soft verse” in such a language? Given this predicament, I argue that the narrative of masculine subjection contained within Ovid’s Amores is redoubled in Marlowe’s translation, as the English poet subjects himself and his language to the influence of a superior model. However, because Ovid’s Amores depict effeminization and even impotence as a means of poetic production, the impotence of the English translator proves to be enabling rather than disabling. Indeed, it proves to be Orphic.

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