Raphael Lyne. Ovid's Changing WarMs: English Metamorphoses, 1567-1632.

Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. xii + 303 pp. bibl. index. $65. ISBN: 0-19-818704-1.

The English Metamorphoses of this title enfigure the struggle of Elizabethan literary culture to come to terms with Ovid's popular poem as a representative of the larger challenge devolved upon Renaissance Europe by its classical past. Lyne examines four poems--Golding's 1567 translation, Spenser's Faerie Queene, Drayton's Poly-Olbion and Sandys' 1632 Ovid--in which "imitation" plays out with an intertextual complexity virtually surpassing what classical scholars recognize in ancient texts. On the simplest level, the Metamorphoses serves the ambitions of the English poets to celebrate their contemporary moment with nationalistic poetry, for which they recognize in Ovid's polymorphous abundance a less constraining narrative precedent than Vergil offers. Yet both in its diffuseness and in its discomforting perceptions of natural and human volatility the Metamorphoses proves an awkward, anxiety-producing model that never quite fits any single mode of interpretation. Lyne prefaces his approach to these provocative tensions by invoking theoretical formulations of the cultural competition fostered by the interaction of old texts with new. His polysemous "changing worlds" encompass both the transformations effected within poetry and mutations of language and climate that bear upon it.

A vision that encounters the Metamorphoses as a whole is, Lyne proposes, a feature uniting the four poems, and a key theme of his four chapters, which explore not only the interactions of the English texts with their Latin background, but also with each other. As chronological endposts of the discussion, Golding's pioneering rendition, famously regarded as a wellspring of English Ovidianism, and Sandy's illustrated "Virginian Ovid" contrast a dogged conversion of Ovid's language into English with a Latinate smoothness which employs cognate and analogous wordplay to rival the sophistication of the poet's verbal wit. Responses to Pythagoras' problematically unmythological rationalization of historical and natural change in Metamorphoses 15 contrast Golding, who inappropriately tries to construct this voice as a moral authority for the poem, with Spenser, who approaches Ovid more closely when he positions his Mutability Cantos in an oblique relationship to the transformative dynamics of The Faerie Queene, with implications less reassuring than the perpetual cycle of renewal in the Garden of Adonis. Lyne foregrounds two aspects of Spenser's Ovidianism: his pervasive obsession with instability and the ambiguities spun out by his interweaving of Ovidian motifs through clusters of allusion and intertextuality. "Spenser's reception of the Metamorphoses," Lyne observes, "perhaps allows us to see more clearly quite how serious the dilemmas of Ovid's epic can be" (138).

More insistently nationalistic than Spenser, Drayton also captures Ovid's seriousness in his Heroical Epistles overtly modeled upon Ovid's epistolographic persona creation in the Heroides. While Ovid's betrayed women undermine the authority of previous mythological texts by inscribing their heroic lovers' treachery, Drayton's English voices interrogate historical process for its particular cruelty to them. To Fair Rosamund's victimized complaint of her shamed confinement, King Henry answers nothing more sensitive than a smarmy "old kings suffer too." Although recent feminist scholars fault Ovid's tolerance of rape in his stories, it was once argued that his poems manifest a particular sympathy for feminine points of view, a quality Lyne adumbrates here as a "composite feminine subtext" derived from Ovid (168). Given his attention to this model, and his overall accuracy in recognizing allusions, it seems odd that he rejects Ovid's calendrical Fasti, a poem more affirmatively nationalistic than the Metamorphoses, as model for the chorographic Poly Olbion. Rather, he strains the limits of Forschungsquellen by aligning Drayton's visual English geography with an Ovidian "cosmic" mapping based upon the Metamorphoses' chronological trans-Mediterranean drift towards Roman Italy bolstered by recent scholarship elaborating hegemonic self-consciousness among Augustan writers. Nevertheless, the Fasti, containing its own archival share of transformational mythology, is, like Poly-Olbion, segmentally structured, and its speaker likewise engages in dialogue with multiple voices mapping Roman spaces to illuminate the interassociation of landscape, legend, and the ritual year.

While the subversive ironies of Ovid's poem flaunt the inevitability of change as a counter to forms of authoritarian domination, its potential within the more affirmative political climate of Elizabethan England breeds apprehension along with admiration. In exploring the darker tensions emanating from this cultural interface with subtle readings and felicitous generalizations, Lyne enters into what he terms the "post-modern aesthetics" of Ovidian scholarship.

ELEANOR WINSOR LEACH

Indiana University