Harmful Eloquence: Ovid's Amores from Antiquity to Shakespeare.

This book begins from a curious, but basically correct, observation: of all the work that has been done on Ovid in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, comparatively little attention has been paid to the legacy of the Amores. Harmful Eloquence was designed to rectify this situation. Stapleton begins with an analysis of the Amores that sets up the discussion to follow, focusing on the role of the persona within the sequence of poems and the character of the speaker, the desultor amoris "who lies, gossips, bothers the help, sleeps with one's maid, threatens to reveal the affair to one's husband, begs and whines for sex, is physically abusive, boasts, depersonalizes, impregnates, and always, always, always blames" (25-26). This character remained little known in the early Middle Ages, but by the twelfth century he had been thoroughly medievalized. Decades ago, Wilibald Schrotter and Edmond Faral claimed that the troubadours drew heavily on Ovid; Stapleton extends their discussion to include the Amores, suggesting that Guillaume IX, the Ripoll poet, and Bernart de Ventadorn learned to try on their poetic masks in creative rivalry with Ovid's desultor amoris. Both Dante and Petrarch knew this tradition, and both sought to exorcise its amoral, Protean desultor; in Stapleton's reading, the Vita nuova is Dante's failed Ovidian exorcism while the Rime is Petrarch's successful one. The last chapter turns to Shakespeare, arguing that the Amores, in Marlowe's translation, served as a key intertext for Sonnets 127-54.

While I am not convinced that this analysis forces us to make many radi00cal changes in the way we read medieval and Renaissance poetry, I am satisfied that like any good study in intertextuality, it gives us a new and worthwhile way to sharpen our critical discussion. My reservations, however, revolve less around what Stapleton says than what he does not say. The book was designed to trace the influence of the Amores in European literature from 500 to 1600 A.D., yet when the introductory chapter on Ovid is removed, only 120 pages remain in which to complete this substantial assignment. A lot happens, for example, between Petrarch and Shakespeare, and Stapleton offers two suggestive paragraphs (131-32) on how attention to the role of Ovid's desultor might shed new light on the history of Renaissance Petrarchism. This, however, is material for a chapter on its own, not a coda to one on Petrarch. And what of the Neo-Latin love lyric, so obviously indebted to Ovid?

Another disappointing omission results from Stapleton's methodology. He begins by identifying features in the Amores that interest Ovid's twentieth-century readers - the collection of poems viewed as a sequence, for example, and the voice of the persona. He then finds these same features in later poets and concludes tentatively, "Ovid seems to have spawned a medieval taste for elegies of love and exile and their worldly ironies, as well as a poetic consciousness of the narrative ego and its possibilities . . . . Ovid's tableaux of courtship and adultery in the Amores seem to have been responsible for many of the 'courtly' conceptions of love in the Middle Ages, since they surface in lyric and narrative form" (42-43; my emphasis). The hesitation here stems ultimately from the fact that Stapleton has found no real evidence that earlier readers were actually interested in the same aspects of the Amores that interest us. To be sure, there is no shortage of material to which one can turn for information on how Ovid was read in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: manuscript commentaries, prefaces to printed editions, commonplace books, and the like. Stapleton ignores most of this material, and unfortunately his occasional nod in this direction does not help his case. The passage I have just quoted, for example, follows a brief analysis of an accessus in Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, clm 631. At the end of this analysis, Stapleton is forced to admit that "[t]here is no notion of the Amores as sequence, nor is there any consideration of their protean narrative voice, the persona" (41). This is not to say that such notions cannot be found, but until the work started here is finished, it will be difficult to confirm the hypotheses Stapleton so tantalizingly proposes.

CRAIG KALLENDORF Texas A&M University