Barbarous Antiquity: Reorienting the Past in the Poetry of Early Modern England

By Miriam Jacobson

In the late sixteenth century, English merchants and diplomats ventured into the eastern Mediterranean to trade directly with the Turks, the keepers of an important emerging empire in the Western Hemisphere, and these initial exchanges had a profound effect on English literature. While the theater investigated representations of religious and ethnic identity in its portrayals of Turks and Muslims, poetry, Miriam Jacobson argues, explored East-West exchanges primarily through language and the material text. Just as English markets were flooded with exotic goods, so was the English language awash in freshly imported words describing items such as sugar, jewels, plants, spices, paints, and dyes, as well as technological advancements such as the use of Arabic numerals in arithmetic and the concept of zero.

Even as these Eastern words and imports found their way into English poetry, poets wrestled with paying homage to classical authors and styles. In Barbarous Antiquity, Jacobson reveals how poems adapted from Latin or Greek sources and set in the ancient classical world were now reoriented to reflect a contemporary, mercantile Ottoman landscape. As Renaissance English writers including Shakespeare, Jonson, Marlowe, and Chapman weighed their reliance on classical poetic models against contemporary cultural exchanges, a new form of poetry developed, positioned at the crossroads of East and West, ancient and modern. Building each chapter around the intersection of an Eastern import and a classical model, Jacobson shows how Renaissance English poetry not only reconstructed the classical past but offered a critique of that very enterprise with a new set of words and metaphors imported from the East.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Aug 25, 2014
• ISBN: 9780812290073

Book preview

Barbarous Antiquity

BARBAROUS

ANTIQUITY

Reorienting the Past in the Poetry

of Early Modern England

MIRIAM JACOBSON

Copyright © 2014 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for

purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book

may be reproduced in any form by any means without

written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jacobson, Miriam Emma.

Barbarous antiquity : reorienting the past in the poetry of

early modern England / Miriam Jacobson. — 1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8122-4632-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. English poetry—Early modern, 1500-1700—History and criticism. 2. English language—Early modern, 1500-1700—Diction. 3. English literature—Classical influences. 4. English literature—Foreign influences. 5. Great Britain—Commerce—Middle East. 6. Middle East—Commerce—Great Britain. 7. Commerce—Terminology. 8. Commercial products in literature. I. Title.

PR535.L3J33 2014

821'.309357—dc23

2014004922

For my parents

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction: Trafficking with Antiquity: Trade, Poetry, and Remediation

PART I. BARBARIAN INVASIONS

Chapter 1. Strange Language: Imported Words in Jonson’s Ars Poetica

Chapter 2. Shaping Subtlety: Sugar in The Arte of English Poesie

PART II. REDEEMING OVID

Chapter 3. Publishing Pain: Zero in The Rape of Lucrece

Chapter 4. Breeding Fame: Horses and Bulbs in Venus and Adonis

PART III. REORIENTING ANTIQUITY

Chapter 5. On Chapman Crossing Marlowe’s Hellespont: Pearls, Dyes, and Ink in Hero and Leander

Epilogue: The Peregrinations of Barbarous Antiquity

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Illustrations

Figure 1. Ben Jonson’s copy of George Puttenham’s

The Arte of English Poesie

Figure 2. Geometrical shapes and lozenge-shaped poems,

The Arte of English Poesie

Figure 3. Persian, Arabic, and Chaldaic alphabets, Champfleury

Figure 4. Printer’s device of Thomas Berthelet

Figure 5. Printer’s device of Thomas Purfoot

Figure 6. Lucretia cameo, Jacopo da Trezzo and Jan Vermeyen

Figure 7. Map of Asia as a Pegasus, Heinrich Bünting

Figure 8. Fritillaries, Paradisi in Sole

Figure 9. Tulips, The herball or Generall historie of plantes

Figure 10. Plate with Hero and Leander

Figure 11. Map of the Hellespont, George Sandys

Figure 12. Map of the Hellespont, Fynes Moryson

Figure 13. Hero and Leander, Peter Paul Rubens

Introduction

Trafficking with Antiquity: Trade,

Poetry, and Remediation

In the poetry of late sixteenth-century England, writers struggled with ambivalence toward ancient Greek and Latin poetic paradigms. Classical antiquity was already estranged: as a fragmented, partially obscured, and lost golden age, it was only partly accessible through its literary remains. Though they wrote in vernacular English, most early modern writers were nevertheless schooled in Latin from childhood. As they wrestled with this literary legacy, writers turned to contemporary mercantile trade for new models and metaphors. Much of this trade was located in the Levant, the same space occupied by the classical myths that inspired much of early modern poetry. In this way, the classical antiquity represented in early modern English poetry became newly barbarous.

The growing appetite for foreign goods and England’s increased diplomacy with the Ottoman Empire had an impact not only on early modern drama but on poetry as well, and this can be traced, in part, through philology. In 1581, the Turkey Company was founded, the first successful English trade company to begin importing goods into England directly from Turkey (previously the Russia Company traded with the East, attempting trade with Persia). In 1593, the Turkey Company officially became the Levant Company. The first English ambassadors to the Ottoman Empire were merchants; thus, Anglo-Ottoman diplomatic relations were from the start bound up with trade. And with trade came new imports and new, imported English words for such things, words for things that, though they must have been known to the ancient classical world, did not have Greek or Latin names.¹ And these words were quickly adopted and assimilated by English poets, figuring prominently in poetry that still paid homage to ancient Greek and Roman models.

It would be a Herculean task to document the number of newly assimilated late sixteenth-century English words that describe goods and practices imported from the Far East and North Africa by way of the Ottoman Mediterranean, a task that no one has accomplished thus far.² As the appetite for imported luxury goods continued to grow in this period, words for exotic spices and pharmaceuticals—including sugar, candy, syrup, julep, marzipan, and eryngo—enhanced the vocabularies of English writers, dyers, and culinary artists. Although words for some of these objects were in use in English in the late Middle Ages, the Oxford English Dictionary reveals that their English meanings shifted and expanded greatly in the middle of the sixteenth century. A variety of words connected with artists’ pigments and the dyed textile trade were introduced into the English language in this period, words like crimson (from Turkish kirmiz, a beetle crushed to create the scarlet dye), turquoise, indigo, and ultramarine (from their places of origin in Turkey, India, and a place beyond the sea, the Lapis mines of Afghanistan).³ The terms for the different types of flowering bulbs imported from Turkey—including tulip, which takes its name from the Persian word for turban—were so numerous that they took up twenty-five additional pages between the first and second editions of Gerard’s Herball in 1597 and 1633.

In early modern English, the word import functioned only as a verb, not as a noun in the sense that I am using it.⁴ The terms merchandise, wares, and goods described what we now call imports. By the middle of the seventeenth century, English writers were already describing imported words as if they were merchandise. A dedicatory poem states this boldly in the front matter of Thomas Blount’s English lexicon Glossographia: or a Dictionary, Interpreting all such Hard Words, Whether Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, Teutonick, Belgick, British or Saxon; as are now used in our refined English Tongue (1656): And, as with Merchandize, with terms it fares, / Nations do traffic Words, as well as Wares.⁵ Blount’s address to his readers emphasizes the abundance of imported foreign words assimilated into English, depicting each culture’s contribution almost as a plundering of treasure.⁶

We can draw a parallel between these imported words’ currency in English and the way the goods they refer to were imported through early modern mercantile markets. These words might be seen as global versions of what Pierre Bourdieu has termed the economy of linguistic exchange.⁷ A similar collection of Eastern (Turkish, Sanskrit, Persian, and Semitic) words and imports began to function as poetic currency in the texts that this book examines, mirroring and mimicking the way that the materials they signified functioned as global commodities within the Ottoman Mediterranean. Jonathan Gil Harris has recently noted the correlation between the migration of pepper as an Indian import to Europe and to the New World, and then back to Asia, and the way the words pepper and its cognate, pimiento, similarly moved from Indian through European, American, and Oriental vocabularies.⁸ To clarify, then: foreign words come into England with foreign trade, and many of them describe the new goods that have entered the country. But unlike the imports they denote (the material objects signified), these words were not exchanged for money or other words within the English language: they circulated freely. More important, these words circulated associatively, forming a web or network of meanings and associations rather than corresponding one to one with the object they signified. Thus, an early modern reader might encounter the word orient while reading Marlowe’s Hero and Leander and associate the word with any number of different things—the East, a sunrise, a bright light, a nacreous pearl. The formulation of early modern language proposed by Foucault, which has been adopted by other scholars of early modern material textuality and philology⁹ serves as a useful model here. Foucault imagines early modern language as a web of associations, with meanings renewed in every interval, which combines here and there with the forms of the world and becomes interwoven with them.¹⁰ Each of the words this book examines forms a point in this web composed of many different associative strands. The meaning of the word thus fluctuates throughout the early modern text, just as it fluctuates throughout early modern culture.

Just as the imported goods in question did not supplant established commodities, these words augmented English vocabularies. As poetic currency, new words did not replace existing imagery; they enhanced it. Even in English translations of Latin, new words amplify the original text: the early modern English word cipher (zero, imported from the Middle East) shows up in Marlowe’s translation of Ovid’s Amores 3.6 to describe impotence, and the word orient (nacreous) appears several times in Philemon Holland’s translation of Pliny’s Historia Naturalis, describing the luminescent quality of pearls.¹¹ Though orient is of Latin origin, starting in the middle of the sixteenth century, this word was used to refer to a pearl’s shine. Though they may have encountered these concepts, neither Pliny nor Ovid had access to any of these words; they came to Europe by way of mercantile exchange but were only naturalized when European traders began to adopt them in practice. Zero was adopted through contact with Arab and South Asian mathematical culture, and jewel merchants brought back pearls from the Persian Gulf and Sri Lanka, utilizing the term orient as a way of grading and valuing a gem.

The central premise of Barbarous Antiquity is that the growing English appetite for strange things and stranger words extended to literary production: poets and printers of the period responded to the same allure by incorporating foreign words and images into their poetry—texts that simultaneously paid homage to ancient Greek and Roman writers and styles. These words and images inaugurate a new poetic economy, reconfiguring cultural attitudes toward ancient and modern, East and West, and redefining what it meant to write and publish poetry in English during the Renaissance. Often imported words or names for imported things appear only a few times within a poetic text, but what matters is their placement at key moments of the narrative, not their frequency. Working together with imagery, as verbal representations of foreign merchandise, words and things create new networks of associations with early modern overseas trade.

Although early modern global trade and Anglo-Ottoman relations have been a popular topic in early modern literary scholarship, few studies have turned from analyses of drama to poetry.¹² This is partly because the early modern stage was prime space for negotiating issues of cultural and religious identity, and with the exception of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, we rarely find representations of Turks, Muslims, and Saracens in early modern poetry modeled on classical narrative and lyric. The majority of stage depictions of Ottoman characters engage with negative representations of the powerful, early modern Ottoman Empire as bloodthirsty, idolatrous, sybaritic, and overly militaristic, representations that can also be found in the multiplicity of meanings for the word Turk in the period, many of which point to uncouth and barbaric behavior.¹³

As Jonathan Burton has demonstrated, early modern English poetry is fairly uninterested in Turkish racial or religious identity, other than to stereotype it.¹⁴ In looking for representations of Turks themselves in poetry, Burton finds no evidence of the Turks as trading partners as allies.¹⁵ But what if we turn our attention away from Ottoman identity and look for Ottoman imports? We do find references to mercantilism and non-Western commodities in poetry. And as Roland Greene has demonstrated in his analysis of Petrarchism, many early modern English poetic forms, like the sonnet, were themselves imports, originating in Persian and Arab literary culture and making their way into Britain through Italy by way of Mediterranean trade routes.¹⁶ As this book will show, early modern poetry depicted England’s exchanges with trading partners to the East and South differently from drama, through language and imagery of imported commodities rather than through positive or negative representations of Ottoman identity. Commodities imported from the eastern Mediterranean were often ornate luxury goods, which had much in common with early modern metaphors for poetic ornament as oriental gemstones, imported cosmetics, pigments, and dyes.

Trafficking with the East

Engaging directly with the Ottomans for the first time, the English disrupted and reoriented the flow of trade around the Mediterranean. Up to this period, goods originating in the Ottoman and Islamic Middle East and North Africa had come into England by way of the Catholic European West (Italy, France, Portugal, and Spain). Once the English began offering British woolen kersies and English-mined tin and lead directly to Turkey, Venetian and French middlemen could no longer offer English wool to the Turks at higher cost. The flow of traffic no longer moved east to west along a horizontal axis; it now moved north to England and south to North Africa, in widening circles and arcs.

The word East serves here as a fragile placeholder for a number of different global coordinates and cultures (among them eastern Europe, central Asia, Anatolia, the Maghreb, Persia, India, and Indonesia). The Ottoman Empire is only the East when viewed from the European perspective. East implies a division between Europe as West, Asia and North Africa as East, but this bilateral division was not clear in sixteenth-century cartography. Where was the line drawn, when the Ottoman Empire’s borders were liquid and flexible? Equally useful to understanding early modern English global geography is the notion of North and South, where the South encompasses not only the Italian Mediterranean, but Spain and North Africa as well.¹⁷ To early modern readers and writers on all sides of the Mediterranean, the late sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire was more than simply the East, a diachronic space in the history of dialogue between East and West. That empire held a uniquely polychronic space, not only because of the multiple temporalities it encompassed, as the current occupant of the lands formerly part of ancient Greece and Rome, but because it constructed its own space in a more malleable, fluid way. Its lands and seas stretched from the Greek islands across the Mediterranean and south to North Africa, east to Jerusalem, and up into central Asia. As Palmira Brummett’s and Halil Inalcik’s histories of early modern Ottoman expansion have shown, the Ottoman Empire’s boundaries were defined by sea trade more than by land conquest, and they were almost always subject to change.¹⁸ On the one hand, the Ottomans redefined empire by blending trade with diplomacy, seafaring with conquest, creating something new and different from the Western empires of the classical past. On the other hand, sixteenth-century Ottoman rulers themselves were aware of the layered temporal landscapes they inhabited, redefining themselves as new Roman rulers. Both the Ottoman sultans and the Hapsburg emperors in the sixteenth century would aspire to resurrect the Roman Empire.¹⁹

Because of the fluidity of the Ottoman Empire’s borders and its translation of diplomacy into trade, early modern engagements between England and the Ottoman Empire thus participate in something different from a linear discourse of East and West; they create multitemporal and transglobal configurations. As Jerry Brotton’s analysis of sixteenth-century cartography reveals, early modern European travelers and explorers also viewed the classical world and the lands occupied by the Ottoman Empire as one and the same: The supposedly ‘western’ world of Europe actually defined itself as coextensive with, rather than in contradistinction to, the classical world of the east, whatever its intellectual and cultural dimensions.²⁰ We can join Brotton’s analysis of a coextensive East and West with Jonathan Gil Harris’s multilayered approach to history, which entails moving beyond diachronic and synchronic models of narrative space in favor of multitemporal, or polychronic strata.²¹ In other words, for English eyes, the lands of the early modern Ottoman Empire were in the process of becoming the East but were not fixed in space or time. They were also, at the same time, lands of classical antiquity and ancient Greek myth. The site of ancient Troy, near ancient Abydos, was also the site of an Ottoman military garrison: both places were coextensive and equally present for early modern readers and travelers.

One such traveler and writer was George Sandys, who is known for his English translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1632). Sandys wrote an extensive and richly illustrated narrative documenting his travels across Europe to the Ottoman Empire in 1610.²² As an antiquarian, he was curious in the search of Antiquities, keen to explore the monumental relics of ancient European empires and to learn as much as he could about the history of the current cultural groups that controlled and occupied those lands and waterways.²³ For an English antiquarian like Sandys, the ancient classical past might have felt more vivid and alive than either the medieval Orthodox past or the Muslim present. As he travels through the Mediterranean and farther east into central Asia, Sandys must find a way to reconcile his familiar but extinct classical antiquity with the unfamiliar yet jarringly contemporary cultures and religious groups of the early seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire.

As Sandys remarks in his dedicatory epistle to King James, the lands and artifacts of classical antiquity so precious to English literary history were now sadly in the possession of the Ottoman Empire, the barbarous Tyrant posessing the thrones of ancient and iust dominion.²⁴ Barbarous was originally a classical Latin term for invading northerners, but in early modern English, it came to mean non-European and sometimes Levantine.²⁵ Sandys laments the destruction and disappearance of classical antiquity at the hands of a conquering Muslim empire, but it is clear that what he is mourning is not so much the Ottoman occupation of these lands as the loss of the past itself. The Greek islands are desolate and deteriorated, so highly celebrated by the ancient Poets: but now presenting nothing but ruines, in a great part desolate, it groneth vnder the Turkish thraldome.²⁶ Smyrna is now an early modern Ottoman city with new mosques filled with practicing Muslims: "now violated by the Mahometans, her beautie is turned to deformitie, her knowledge to barbarisme, her religion to impietie."²⁷

What Sandys experiences in these encounters is a kind of temporal and spatial dislocation between the ancient, classical past in the early modern English humanist imagination, the Byzantine Empire in the early modern Christian thinking, and contemporary, early modern Ottoman culture.²⁸ Eliding the lost beauty of ancient myth with the more recent loss of Eastern Christianity, Sandys’s temporality might be seen even to classicize or antiquate medieval history. What does it mean for Western antiquity to be repossessed by barbarous Ottoman foreigners? How does this change the early modern English project of reclaiming Roman antiquity as its own? This book argues that early modern English poetry occupies a space in which English writers negotiated their vexed relationship to classical antiquity by engaging with and appropriating non-Western culture through words and imagery associated with Mediterranean and Asian imports. By trafficking with imagery and vocabularies of imported commodities, early modern English poets also trafficked with, or exchanged, the past, replacing an already fraught vision of classical antiquity with a further estranged and exoticized one. When words and things from the East began to be imported into English, the poets of England revised their attitude toward ancient Greece and Rome. Just as exotic luxury goods, scientific theories, and decorative styles were brought into England from Italy, Persia, and the countries under Ottoman control, so too were foreign, nonnative words absorbed into English. Once these new, imported words started infiltrating poetic texts ostensibly modeled on classical literary traditions, the already complicated status of classical antiquity was thrown further into flux. With the addition of these new concepts, imported neologisms, and imaginary things circulating associatively through early modern culture and texts, antiquity itself took on the characteristics of Levantine and Asian cultures, becoming barbarous.

Trafficking with the Past

Latin literature was the staple for an early modern humanist grammar school education, where boys learned to write, speak, and orate in Latin in imitation of Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Cicero, and Seneca. Yet although early modern English writers acknowledged and paid homage to the literary authority of classical antiquity, by the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, there were signs of strain in English writers’ relationship to ancient Greek and Roman culture. The English had recently broken away from the Roman Catholic Church, and they viewed the ancient Romans as both ancestors (via the Troy myth) and conquerors (via the narrative of the Four Empires: Roman, Danish, Saxon, and Norman).²⁹ Latin had been banished from the Anglican Church and was preserved only at the courts and schoolrooms. And the English language was rapidly expanding to include new Latinate forms of English words alongside words imported from England’s growing global encounters with non-Western cultures.³⁰ Leonard Barkan, Sean Keilen, and Jonathan Gil Harris have exposed fissures in the early modern cultural elevation of classical antiquity.³¹ In his analysis of broken ancient Roman monuments and sculpture, Barkan argues that early modern Europeans viewed classical antiquity itself as a collection of fragments, and Keilen notes that early modern English depictions of the classical past as a golden age allowed writers to question and critique the practice of classical imitation and the authority of the ancients. Harris encourages us to read the layered landscape of early modern London with its ancient Hebrew mural inscriptions as a temporal palimpsest that impresses an occidental present onto an oriental past.

The alternately familiar and vexed relationship of early modern English writers to classical antiquity derives in part from the authority that the Elizabethan education system vested in Latin authors, grammar, and language. For Jeff Dolven, skepticism and self-doubt smolder at the roots of English humanism, which is why English writers turned to Romance (a genre excluded from classical hierarchies).³² The violent discipline that characterized classical humanist education may have made the authority of the ancients seem savage and barbarous itself: Dolven and Lynn Enterline note that corporal punishment of children was at the heart of classical humanist education of schoolboys.³³ Some of this violence characterizes the speaker’s frustration in Philip Sidney’s sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella. In the first sonnet, the poet struggles with writer’s block and characterizes his creative capacity as a boy exposed to corporal punishment: Invention, Nature’s child, fled step-dame study’s blows (AS, 1.10). Later, the speaker rails against his humanist education in moral virtue, claiming that Cato’s philosophy is better suited to Churches or Schooles (AS, 4.6) and the poet’s mouth too tender for thy hard bit (AS, 4.8). Throughout the sequence, Astrophil describes himself as Stella’s shackled, tortured slave and in several instances speaks of the failure of his humanist education to help him in love.³⁴

Even Ben Jonson, famous for his classical learning and his adoption of the Roman poet Horace’s ideals in the creation of his own literary plain style, acknowledges the ambivalence early modern writers felt when confronted with authority of classical antiquity. "Non nimium credendum antiquitati (not particularly believing in the ancients") he wrote in Timber (1641), his published commonplace book and ars poetica.³⁵ Jonson explains that as much as writers ought to acknowledge and emulate ancient Greek and Roman erudition, they must also move past it, not to rest in their sole authority, or take all upon trust from them. Demonstrating his mastery of Latin commonplacing, Jonson peppers this ambivalent passage with quotations. Classical writers should act "Non domini nostri, sed duces fuere (not as our leaders but as our guides). He concludes with a combination of English and Latin slightly paraphrased from Seneca: Truth lies open to all; it is no man’s several. Patet omnibus veritas; nondum est occupata. Multum ex illa, etiam futuris relicta est. The English phrase that opens this commonplace, Truth lies open to all, and so on, appears in the first Latin sentence, but Jonson leaves the second sentence untranslated: And there is plenty of it [Truth] left even for posterity to discover."³⁶ The phrase is found in Seneca’s epistle 33 (line 11). In his combination of Latin and English sententiae, Jonson is able to ground his idea about departing from classical authority in Roman literary authority itself, both paying homage to his classical humanist education and inviting others to transcend it.

The early modern ambivalence to Greek and Latin antiquity also may have been bolstered by the representation of British and northern Europeans themselves as barbarous tribes in classical Latin texts. Some writers, like Spenser and Harvey, attempted to reclaim this native English Gothish behavior by linking it to the innocence of Ovid’s Golden Age (Metamorphoses I. 89–112). Both Thomas Campion and Samuel Daniel describe English as a barbarous language, but they dispute whether it is suited to classical hexameters, with Daniel arguing that the imposition of Latin hexameters onto English forces it to seem even more uncouth.³⁷ But the experience of reading about one’s own ancient ancestors as the very barbarians that Roman writers denigrate must have further complicated the early modern view of Britain’s inherited and imposed Roman literary legacy.

One way early modern poets responded to this frustrated bond with the literary authority of classical antiquity was by emulating a Roman poet whose writings were perceived as counter-classical (to borrow W. R. Johnson’s and Heather James’s terminology). That poet was Ovid.³⁸ Shakespeare and the poets of the 1590s preserve an early modern interest in classical poetics only by appropriating the work of a classical poet who was anything but classical. For James, this means that the kind of classicism that early modern poets located in Ovidian narrative and elegy made classicism itself commensurate with early modern poetic experimentation and innovation. The task of early modern humanism, which, as Enterline teaches us was physically beaten into schoolboys in the Latin grammar schools, was to imitate the ancients.³⁹ Yet the fragmented material remains of Roman culture made antiquity seem both foreign and incomplete.⁴⁰ Perhaps this is why so many poets turned to Ovid, whose writing unravels the threads of his own classical literary culture from within. If Ovid is counter-classical for early modern English readers, it is not simply because his poems are violent, erotic, and fantastical; he is counter-classical because these aspects of his poetry align themselves with foreignness in a period when Britain was encountering and engaging with exogamous cultures to a greater extent than ever before.

In their appropriations of Ovid’s poetry, early modern English poets not only engaged in a process of rewriting the classical in early modern England; they constantly augmented these Ovidian appropriations with new imported words and concepts from contemporary eastern Mediterranean trade as a way of dealing with the challenges presented by a fragmented, outdated literary inheritance. In this instance, it might be useful to think about the reliance of English poets on classical sources moving beyond imitatio (replicating the arguments, methods, and style of classical authors) to a version of remediation. As defined by the digital media scholars Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, remediation involves both a material refashioning and a dialectic between older forms of media and newer ones; it is that which appropriates the techniques, forms, and social significance of other media and attempts to rival or refashion them in the name of the real.⁴¹ Thus, we might see printed English verse translations or appropriations of stories taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (poems that we now call epyllia) and dramatic performances incorporating his writings (such as Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus) as textual remediations of first-century classical Latin codices, of illuminated manuscripts and the fourteenth-century Ovide Moralisé, of sixteenth-century printed, woodcut-illustrated vernacular translations, and everything in between. Though Bolter and Grusin readily point out that written texts can be remediated in the same way that visual images are, and that this process is an ancient one, I find that early modern poetry calls for a modified version of their initial theoretical model. Each new version of early modern printed and manuscript literature did not necessarily struggle to provide what Grusin and Bolter call immediacy (the vanishing or supplanting of the media itself by its content).⁴² In contrast, early modern English textual and linguistic conventions continually forced readers and writers to confront the textual medium’s material shape and the space it occupied.⁴³ Early modern textual remediation drew attention to the material text, not away from it. It was a process that involved both translation and appropriation but highlighted rather than ignored the newness of the material media in which it worked: media that included the printed and illustrated text, poetic and rhetorical ornament, and new English vocabularies derived from imported words and things.⁴⁴

Early modern poetic remediation is Ovidian in nature: the writers of this period described the processes of translation and the adoption of figurative language as metamorphosis.⁴⁵ And Ovid was the Roman poet most widely translated from Latin into the vernacular in England and Europe—the vast number of European vernacular editions of Ovid’s texts printed in the sixteenth century attests to his immense popularity.⁴⁶ Therefore, it could be said that Ovid’s Metamorphoses was the most appropriate text for early modern writers to remediate, given that it contained numerous tales of characters whose bodies and thoughts were remediated into other material forms. Another aspect of early modern Ovidian remediation occurs when English poets reconfigure a poem by introducing nonclassical vocabularies and concepts into Ovidian narrative. Arthur Golding’s Englished Ovid, which replaces nymphs with fairies, dryads with elves, and Hades with Hell, serves as one such example.⁴⁷ The poems that this book examines are another: they incorporate other, nonclassical elements, from Arabic arithmetic to Turkish bulbs and dyed textiles. Thus, I maintain that it was not only Ovid’s popularity in print and his rejection of Augustan decorum that made him so appealing a poet to early modern imitators; it was also his preoccupation with strangeness and otherness, and his own history of exile and marginalization to the Black Sea, the limits of the Roman Empire, that made his poetry an ideal crucible for the early modern experimental importation of new media, including foreign words and ornament.

Ornamentalism

As Georgia Brown and Gordon Braden have demonstrated, the highly rhetorical and elaborately structured Ovidian narrative poems of the 1590s—three of which (The Rape of Lucrece, Venus and Adonis, and Hero and Leander) take up the largest part of this book’s attention—are self-conscious of their own ornamental form.⁴⁸ To some extent, the ornate style of Renaissance English narrative verse has its origins in late classical minor epics attributed to the school of Nonnos, of which Grammaticus Musaeus’s poem Hero and Leander is the most well known today.⁴⁹ Yet the extravagance of early modern English epyllia cannot be attributed solely to the ancient origins of the poems’ form. Poetic and rhetorical handbooks compare poetic ornament to luxury goods imported from the East like precious stones, colored textiles, and cosmetics—the same imagery of Eastern imports that I am arguing populates sixteenth-century English verse.

Drawing on a classical metaphor (color as figurative language), George Puttenham claims that poetry comprises a manner of vtterance more eloquent and rhetoricall than ordinarie prose . . . because it is decked and set out with all maner of fresh colours and figures, which maketh that it sooner in-ueglieth the iudgement of a man.⁵⁰ The phrases decked out and fresh colors suggest fancy dress, freshly rouged cheeks, and a painted canvas. Several times in his treatise, Puttenham draws on the language of bodily decoration to describe poetic tropes, particularly in the third book of the treatise, Of Ornament. There, Puttenham compares poetic ornament to embroidered clothes, judiciously applied facial cosmetics, highly polished marble, and painted miniatures (222). Thomas Wilson places an equally materialistic emphasis on rhetorical ornament, comparing it to exotic, scintillating gemstones. With the use of exornation (poetic and rhetorical figures), our speech may seeme as bright and precious, as a rich stone is faire and orient.⁵¹

The late Elizabethan connection between poetry and ornament was not contained to figurative language alone. Poems themselves were conceived of as having an ornamental material form, and this is evidenced by the way that individual poems and verses, described as flowers, were stored and copied into commonplace books. Poetic anthologies (from the Greek anthos or flower) emphasized this further, highlighting the material and linguistic connection between poems and posies (both deriving from the Greek word poieisin [ποιείσιν], to fashion).⁵² Indeed, for Juliet Fleming, poems together with inscriptions are all part of a larger, more fluid material form known as posy: To contemplate a song of pearl, or a ‘poysee’ (‘posy’, ‘poesie’) ‘made of letters of fine gold’—or, alternatively, a miniature book in an ornamental binding designed to be worn at the waist—is to be unable to distinguish between a poem, a jewel, an acoustical structure and a feat of embroidery.⁵³ In Fleming’s view, early modern writing has an ostentatious materiality that makes poetry indistinguishable from real, material objects.⁵⁴ I would extend this analogy further by noting that each of the inscribed objects Fleming describes—embroidered letters in seed pearl and gold filament, enameled girdle books like Elizabeth’s tiny prayer book—are both ornamented and ornamental. These