A fascination with Ovid is one of the distinctive features of later Elizabethan literature. But reading and imitating Ovid was central to the humanist education in English grammar schools throughout the century (Baldwin 1944), and the impact of this on English poetry begins to be felt early in Elizabeth’s reign. The 1560s saw a spate of translations: Arthur Golding’s complete Metamorphoses (1567), individual tales in T. H.’s Fable of Ovid Treating of Narcissus (1560) and Thomas Peend’s Pleasant Fable of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis (1565), George Turberville’s translation of the Heroides (1567), and Thomas Underdowne’s of Ibis (1569); Thomas Churchyard’s translation of Tristia, books 1-3, followed in 1572. But the first substantial original work to make prominent use of Ovid in the period is George Gascoigne’s The Steel Glass with The Complaint of Philomene (1575). It is especially interesting and unusual because, as later poets would do (Pugh 2005; Heather James 2005), it uses Ovid for political ends (Maslen 2000a). Indeed, it couples Ovid with Lucilius, the outspoken Republican satirist, as its twin classical inspirations.
Gascoigne’s volume has been neglected because it does not fit comfortably into the usual narrative about changing ways of reading Ovid in the Renaissance. The 1560s translations from the Metamorphoses are strongly affected by the moralizing tradition, which dominated the medieval reception of Ovid and still figured in the commentaries in sixteenth-century editions. Peend and T. H. devote as much or more space to moralizing and allegorical interpretations as to their chosen tales. Yet there are signs that this moralization is starting to be seen as an optional extra that readers may ignore (Lyne 2001). Both poems divide into two distinct sections, the moralization clearly separated from the narrative, which is told ‘straight’. In Golding too, though prefatory poems insist on the ‘secret meanings’ and moral usefulness of Ovid’s tales, the translation itself is uncluttered by such material. The later Elizabethan epyllion is usually seen as having completed this detachment, jettisoning accretions of moral commentary to rediscover the amoral, erotic Ovid beneath. Gascoigne, however, does not discard the moralizing, but uses it in the service of qualities we appreciate today: purposeful ambiguity, complexity, and a ludic irony enabling him to criticize authority while evading censorship. All this makes it deeply Ovidian in ways which reach far beyond the translations of the 1560s and yet which are quite different from later Elizabethan epyllia.
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