Christopher Marlowe the Craftsman by Stapleton M.L.; Scott Sarah K.; & M.L. Stapleton

Author:Stapleton, M.L.; Scott, Sarah K.; & M.L. Stapleton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2010-03-28T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

Marlowe’s First Ovid: Certaine of Ovids Elegies

M.L. Stapleton

Marlowe’s translation of Ovid’s Amores is probably his least studied text, with the possible exception of Lucans first booke (1600), his rendition of the Pharsalia.1 Neither of its two versions, All or Certaine of Ovids Elegies (c. 1599), conforms to the concept of the author that mid-twentieth-century criticism and recent popular biography often promulgate, based on reception of the more celebrated Doctor Faustus, Edward II, Tamburlaine, and Hero and Leander. That is, he was an over-reacher who had the rotten luck to be murdered before he could blossom in his purported careers as a spy, rival to Shakespeare, writer of erotic epyllia, and maker of innovative blank verse tragedies for the stage. For this reason, some words of introduction are in order.

It is not entirely clear why Marlowe should have chosen the Amores for translation. This first-person sequence of poems, similar to those of the earlier neoteric elegists Gallus, Propertius, and Tibullus, recounts an adulterous relationship with a rich and unhappily married woman, Corinna, who, for these intertwined reasons, is spectacularly unfaithful to her vir, or husband. In his guise of praeceptor Amoris (teacher of Love), Ovid boasts in the Ars amatoria, his comic guide to seduction that complements this preceding text, that even though her name was pseudonymous, he made her famous. Therefore, his later disavowal in his exile poetry, the Tristia, that these erotic works were autobiographical has struck some readers as unconvincing, a de profundis from his forced exile on the Black Sea.2 Marlowe does not seem to have been aware of these biographical complications or to have understood how they had informed the perceptions of previous readers and translators, the very reception, of Ovid.3 Also, the Amores treats a number of subjects that do not tend to serve as major themes in Faustus, Tamburlaine, Edward II, and Hero: vibrant, bed-breaking heterosexuality perpetrated in the afternoon; happily recounted fornication and cuckoldry trumped by infidelity practiced against this same fornicator and cuckolder; tumescence foiled by fiendish impotence, countered by peevish and untimely re-tumescence and ejaculation, which results in harrowing feminine complaint; a blazon that describes an extremely naked woman (except for one important part). Conversely, the translation does not concern itself with Guises or Ganymedes, pretty lambs, pampered jades, or poisoned baby nuns, a thousand ships, true love’s blood, antic hay, tobacco, or boys, though it surely contains a fool.

Therefore, criticism of the Elegies, unconcerned with its possible worth as poetry, has instead tended toward the bibliographic or sometimes even contemptuous and pedantic. J.B. Steane observed: “Charges of incompetence and immaturity have so crabbed the approach that one feels a frowning countenance to be expected of the discriminating reader throughout. For myself, I find it impossible to maintain beyond a few lines.”4 Yet even now, nearly a half-century later, a review of the most recent version of Marlowe’s non-dramatic output devotes itself almost entirely to its sole critical tradition, the alleged incompetence of the translator, to which one of his most celebrated twentieth-century editors devotes not one but two long essays.

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