Ovid’s story of Philomel, the maiden raped and mutilated by her brother-in-law Tereus and finally transformed into a nightingale, frames Gascoigne’s volume. The
Fig. 34.1 Tereus cuts out Philomel's tongue. Ovid, Metamorphoseon (1582), Q6r.
Steel Glass begins by invoking the nightingale, who, like Gascoigne, sings for lovers, and who teaches him to defy his enemies:
This worthy bird, hath taught my weary Muze,
To sing a song, in spight of their despight,
Which worke my woe, withouten cause or crime.
(Bir)
Those enemies, Gascoigne explains, are in fact descendants of Philomel’s persecutor Tereus, who ‘did carve hir pleasant tong, | To cover so, his owne foule filthy fault’ (Figure 34.1). Gascoigne draws a clear parallel between Philomel’s mutilation and the censorship of his earlier volumes, implying that his censors were motivated by a desire to hide their own ‘foule fault’. The suggestion is that the bishops of the High Commission—or someone behind them—are guilty of the kind of sexual escapades recounted in the Hundred Sundry Flowers. Though Gascoigne asks Philomene to help him tell ‘A tale [...] which may content the mindes | Of learned men, and grave Philosophers’ (B1v), it is already apparent that this morally unexceptionable satire attacks precisely those ‘learned men’ who censored his work.
Before we come to the main body of The Steel Glass’s satire, we encounter an elaborate adaptation of Philomel’s story, which teases out these implications. It opens by springing a very surprising persona on us:
I am not he whom slaunderous tongues have tolde,
(False tongues in dede, and craftie subtile braines)
To be the man, which ment a common spoyle Of loving dames, whose eares wold heare my words Or trust the tales devised by my pen.
I n’am a man, as some do thinke I am,
(Laugh not good Lord) I am in dede a dame,
Or at the least, a right Hermaphrodite.
(B2r)
This hermaphrodite introduces herself as Satyra, daughter to Plain Dealing and Simplicity, sister to Poesy. She relates how the nobleman Vain Delight, attended by followers including False Semblant and Flearing Flattery, married Poesy and took her to live at court. Years later, Vain Delight fetches Satyra to visit her sister; on the return voyage, ‘enflamde’ by Satyra’s song, he ravishes her ‘to please his wanton minde’ (B3v). Fearing that she will ‘disclose | His incest’, he sends Slander to accuse her of enticing him ‘to love and luste’. Finally, they imprison her ‘in cage of Miserie’ and ‘Cut out [her] tong, with Raysor of Restraynte, | Least [she] should wraye, this bloudy deed of his’ (B4r). This is Ovid’s tale of Philomel, with the characters replaced by allegorical personifications. Indeed, Satyra ends by comparing herself to Philomel explicitly, because they are both permitted by the gods to continue singing despite their mutilated tongues.
Gascoigne’s main thrust is obvious. Those who censored his work first used it ‘to please [their] wanton mind’: they enjoyed reading the naughty bits. Indeed, the act of censorship, as in the Philomel story, is intended to conceal the censors’ own crimes. That Gascoigne’s persona is called Satyra contributes to this, implying that the censored work was intended satirically, as indeed the Posies claimed: after the comparisons to Ovid and ‘Virgil’ quoted above, the prefatory poem continues:
Lucilius ledde the daunce, and Horace made the lawe,
That poetes by Aucthoritie, may cal (A dawe) A Dawe,
And eke (a hore) A hore, but yet in cleanly wordes,
So that the vice may be rebukt.
(Gascoigne 2000: 385-6)
If Gascoigne described lewd behaviour, in other words, he did so in the spirit of the satirists Lucilius and Horace, to punish vice by exposing it to public ridicule. Even when it appeared wanton, his poetry was merely holding a mirror to society.
This is also the point of Gascoigne’s main addition to the Philomel story in The Steel Glass, Slander’s accusation that Satyra ‘entist Delight’. This alludes to the charge that the Hundred Sundry Flowers tried to ‘seduce’ young readers, against which Gascoigne argues, in the epistle ‘To al yong Gentlemen’ in the Posies, that the reader is responsible for the moral effect of reading:
As the industrious Bee may gather honie out of the most stinking weede, so the malicious Spider may also gather poyson out of the fayrest floure that growes [...] To speake English it is your using (my lustie Gallants) or misusing of these Posies that may make me praysed or dispraysed for publishing of the same. For if you (where you may learn to avoyd the subtile sandes of wanton desire) will runne upon the rockes of unlawfull lust, then great is your folly, and greater will growe my rebuke. (2000: 366-7)
Again, the position could be derived from Ovid’s defence of the Ars in Tristia 2, where he posits that if readers are viciously inclined, whatever they touch will instruct them in it: even Ennius and Lucretius will prompt thoughts about illicit sex. Verse read in an honest frame of mind, meanwhile, can harm no one. By translating this into the fable of Slander’s attack on Satyra, Gascoigne claims that the author of erotica is as innocent as a rape victim, and the charge that it corrupts the young an undeserved slur on the helpless and abused.
Gascoigne’s adoption of the hermaphroditic persona works to similar ends, as jocular reassurance that this is the work of a chaste and innocent Gascoigne, not the reputed sexual predator of the earlier volumes. It implicitly reprises the image of the ‘Poemata castrata’ in the epistle ‘To the Divines’: hermaphroditism was considered, not a combination of sexual attributes, but a deficiency of masculinity and equivalent to castration. Like Ovid using the image of his own castration to compare Augustus’ treatment of him to the excessive rage of Cybele against Attis, Gascoigne deploys it to align his censors with that other Ovidian figure of tyranny and censorship Tereus. The figurative castration is gradually elided with the glossectomy which Satyra tells us has made her ‘Not as I seemd, a man sometimes of might, | But womanlike, whose teares must venge hir harms’ (B4r).
The emasculated persona is evidently intended to imply that the current work is not only sexually innocent, but altogether innocuous. Like the passive text imagined in the epistle ‘To al yong Gentlemen’, powerless to influence how its readers use or abuse it, Gascoigne suggests that Satyra’s, Philomene’s, and his own ‘mournefull’ plaints are devoid of any manly ‘might’ to act on the world, and merely afford the same relief as ‘teares’. It evokes Ovid’s claim in Tristia 5. 1 that his exile poetry is written only as therapy, like Alycone’s or Procne’s songs, and it is just as disingenuous. Gascoigne’s imitation of the fable of Philomel ends with Satyra’s mutilation and imprisonment, but here, just at the point where he ceases to pursue Ovid’s narrative, a marginal gloss directs us to it: ‘note now and compare this allegory to the story of Progne and Philomele’. Gascoigne thus points us to Ovid’s conclusion, where Philomel is far from helpless. ‘Teares’ are certainly not the only recourse for Ovid’s sisters, who do not lack the ‘might’ to take vengeance. If Gascoigne resembles these women, his enemies should beware. While superficially Satyra elides that vengeance, comparing her song to the ‘pleasant note’ of the nightingale in its aftermath, her description of that song makes it resemble another part of Ovid’s tale:
That with the stumps of my reproved tong,
I may sometimes, Reprovers deedes reprove,
And sing a verse, to make them see themselves.
(B4r)
What reveals and reproves Tereus’ deeds in Ovid’s story is Philomel’s tapestry, which prompts the sisters’ hideous revenge. Beneath the surface, then, it is this potent and dangerous writing to which Gascoigne compares his own.
Given the way in which Satyra’s glossectomy is elided, as noted above, with the figurative castration of Gascoigne and his Posies, the two anatomical extremities becoming blurred into one another, the image of Satyra continuing to sing ‘with the stumps of her reproved tong’ might also prompt us to wonder whether Gascoigne’s continuing to write proves that his ‘castration’ has not been entirely successful— particularly if we remember the frequent puns on pens and penises in The Adventures of Master F. J. Satyra’s song, after all, will be The Steel Glass, Gascoigne’s satirical attack on the corruption and injustice of his society, demonstrating an aggressive potency far from the innocuous, therapeutic lamenting which the femininity of his persona is intended to convey. The unusual spelling of Satyra’s name carries a similar implication, recalling the widespread but false etymology which derived ‘satire’ from ‘satyr’: as well as representing the literary genre, Satyra is also a feminized version of the notoriously lustful mythological beast. A priapic and unreformed Gascoigne peeps through the modest female dress.
The fable of Satyra also makes more general points about the role of poetry in society and about how Ovid should be read. It is strongly reminiscent of an interpretation of Philomel’s story in Sabinus’ well-known commentary, but differs in pointed and significant ways. According to Sabinus, Procne and Philomel
Are to be understood as Oratory and Poetry, which are nearly sisters [...] because one wants to live in roofs and cities, the other in groves and woods, signifying that the swallow is like the eloquence of the city, and those who practise eloquence in houses, in the senate and in the forum. The nightingale is truly like the eloquence of the grove and of poets, who love woods and solitudes, and places haunted by Muses and by gods, not by men, and who handle matters as different from legal disputes as can be imagined.
(intellexisse Oratoriam & Poeticam, quae prope sorores sint [...] quod in altera sit mira libido tecta & urbes incolendi, in altera arbusta & sylvas: significantes hirundinem similem esse urbanae eloquentiae, & illis qui in domibus, in senatu, in foro, suam facundiam exercent; Philomelam vero similem eloquentie nemorali & Poetarum, qui sylvas & solitudines, & loca non ab hominibus, sed a Musis & a diis celebrata, amant: & materias a forensibus controversiis remotissimas tractant.) (1584: 245)
While rhetoric is involved in the social and political, poetry confines itself to a purely aesthetic realm, transcending mundane concerns. For Gascoigne, however, it is Poetry which, as the Procne figure, is taken to the abode of men—here not a city, where political and legal questions are openly debated, but rather the court, home to Vain Delight, Flearing Flattery, Detraction, and Deceit, a place where language is abused to pervert truth and justice. Gascoigne’s Philomel figure is Satyra-satire, and she keeps
Her distance from populous abodes not because she is unconcerned with worldly affairs, but because the false values of court are antipathetic to her. Her ‘simple mynde’ cannot be won ‘from tracke of trustie truth’ by courtiers’ ‘guiles’; in turn her honest speech is not tolerated, but deemed ‘medling’ and suppressed with the ‘Raysor of Restraynte (B3v). Gascoigne implies that, in the transition from the Roman-style mixed constitution evoked by Sabinus’ image of the city, with its senate and forums, to the centralized power of the early modern court, there is no longer any place for oratory’s openness. Poetry takes its place, because its artifice and indirection are more assimilable to the deceptive forms of speech current, and necessary, at court (Ahl 1984; Javitch 1978). Yet this represents not a depoliticization of discourse, but its opposite: the alternative to poetry’s courtiership is not aesthetic transcendence but the critical distance from the centre of power now symbolized by Satyra’s remote dwelling.
Gascoigne’s adaptation reads Ovid’s tale as political satire about satire and freedom of speech (an appropriately self-reflexive gesture for a poem calling itself a mirror). Though his use of allegory may seem quaint, his interpretation is not far-fetched. Within Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Philomel’s tapestry reminds us of another victimized weaver earlier in the same book. Arachne’s depiction of male gods transforming themselves into animals to commit rape resembles Ovid’s own poem and includes some of the same tales. She is punished by an envious Juno, who transforms her into a spider. It is hard not to see a pattern, in which Ovid aligns himself with artists subjugated because they reveal the crimes of tyrants. That the artist in the later Philomel episode achieves revenge suggests that in Ovid, as in Gascoigne, oppression turns art into an oblique political weapon.
World History
