Myth works as a kind of language, an alternative language to that of psychology which necessarily presupposes enough continuity in the referent for meaning to be established by use.
In practice this amounts to the presupposition of certain ‘deep structures’ in human nature. Psychology, which is at least partly scientific, is friendly to myth because of this interest in continuities.
Biology in its turn is quite clearly concerned, in its use of a term like ‘sex’, to refer to ahistorical factors common to almost all animals.
In the he first act of The Winter’s Tale, which gives us the neurotic jealousy of Leontes, is strangely without mythical reference. ‘Everything seems to come from within Leontes’s brittle psyche.’
Then the different order of myth begins to work in the play, a marvellous interweaving of Proserpina (the girl gathering spring flowers who was carried off by the god of the dead) with Pygmalion (who loved a statue and saw it come to life). It is as if Shakespeare sought to reverse this movement, to recover mythical thought and agency.
This special quality of timeless movement assists the powerful association of Ovidian myth with what is technically known as ecphrastic poetry. One of the meanings of ekphrasis is ‘a poem about another (usually visual) work of art’. Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, already referred to, is perhaps the greatest ecphrastic poem in the language. The urn is at first an object of uncanny, cold stillness, but as we gaze on the figures carved on it, we are drawn into a world of heady, Ovidian turbulence. In the Metamorphoses the daughters of Minyas reject the sexual orgies of Bacchus and choose to stay at home and spin. As they work, they in their turn begin story-telling about Pyramus and Thisbe, the same Pyramus and Thisbe who provide matter for the play-within-the-play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In The Rape of Lucrece, Lucrece, as Bate points out, constructs an inner ekphrasis, a visual set-piece in which the ravished Philomel is set before us. In paintings and tapes-tries moments from known, often violent stories are eerily arrested. Bate writes admirably about the varying effects of these ‘nested’ structures
erhaps the most admired of all the many paintings involving an internal image is Velazquez’s Las Meninas; and it may be that that picture speaks to our century because it is more psychological than it is mythical. The time has perhaps come to look more carefully at the same painter’s other great essay in ‘nested’ images, the far more Ovidian Las Hilanderas (‘The Spinners’).
The foreground is occupied by women of Velazquez’s own time, working around the spinning wheel (here is one of the most beautiful, most tenderly painted representations of the back of a woman’s neck in the whole history of Western art). But we can see through into a further, more brightly lit room. There stand three women, much more richly dressed than the spinners, apparently watching a sort of tableau-drama (the awkward compound word reflects the now familiar conjunction of narrative and fixity). Minerva, in a helmet, is rebuking Arachne for daring to make much of her skill in weaving. Beyond them hangs a tapestry showing an early stage in the story of the rape of Europa. In Ovid Arachne tells the story of Europa and the bull in her tapestry before she is turned into the spider, the weaver of webs. It will be observed that this review is getting out of hand: story is begetting story. But that is the Ovidian effect.
In practice this amounts to the presupposition of certain ‘deep structures’ in human nature. Psychology, which is at least partly scientific, is friendly to myth because of this interest in continuities.
Biology in its turn is quite clearly concerned, in its use of a term like ‘sex’, to refer to ahistorical factors common to almost all animals.
In the he first act of The Winter’s Tale, which gives us the neurotic jealousy of Leontes, is strangely without mythical reference. ‘Everything seems to come from within Leontes’s brittle psyche.’
Then the different order of myth begins to work in the play, a marvellous interweaving of Proserpina (the girl gathering spring flowers who was carried off by the god of the dead) with Pygmalion (who loved a statue and saw it come to life). It is as if Shakespeare sought to reverse this movement, to recover mythical thought and agency.
This special quality of timeless movement assists the powerful association of Ovidian myth with what is technically known as ecphrastic poetry. One of the meanings of ekphrasis is ‘a poem about another (usually visual) work of art’. Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, already referred to, is perhaps the greatest ecphrastic poem in the language. The urn is at first an object of uncanny, cold stillness, but as we gaze on the figures carved on it, we are drawn into a world of heady, Ovidian turbulence. In the Metamorphoses the daughters of Minyas reject the sexual orgies of Bacchus and choose to stay at home and spin. As they work, they in their turn begin story-telling about Pyramus and Thisbe, the same Pyramus and Thisbe who provide matter for the play-within-the-play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In The Rape of Lucrece, Lucrece, as Bate points out, constructs an inner ekphrasis, a visual set-piece in which the ravished Philomel is set before us. In paintings and tapes-tries moments from known, often violent stories are eerily arrested. Bate writes admirably about the varying effects of these ‘nested’ structures
erhaps the most admired of all the many paintings involving an internal image is Velazquez’s Las Meninas; and it may be that that picture speaks to our century because it is more psychological than it is mythical. The time has perhaps come to look more carefully at the same painter’s other great essay in ‘nested’ images, the far more Ovidian Las Hilanderas (‘The Spinners’).The foreground is occupied by women of Velazquez’s own time, working around the spinning wheel (here is one of the most beautiful, most tenderly painted representations of the back of a woman’s neck in the whole history of Western art). But we can see through into a further, more brightly lit room. There stand three women, much more richly dressed than the spinners, apparently watching a sort of tableau-drama (the awkward compound word reflects the now familiar conjunction of narrative and fixity). Minerva, in a helmet, is rebuking Arachne for daring to make much of her skill in weaving. Beyond them hangs a tapestry showing an early stage in the story of the rape of Europa. In Ovid Arachne tells the story of Europa and the bull in her tapestry before she is turned into the spider, the weaver of webs. It will be observed that this review is getting out of hand: story is begetting story. But that is the Ovidian effect.
In Cymbeline we find more ekphrasis. Before she is so to speak visually raped by Iachimo, Imogen has been reading in Ovid himself (!) about the rape of Philomel. In the room where she lies, meanwhile, the chimney-piece is carved with representations of Diana bathing. Those who knew the myths would sense at once the nearness of Actaeon who, like Iachimo, was a voyeur. Remember Eliot in The Waste Land:
Above the antique mantel was displayed
As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene
The change of Philomel by the barbarous king
So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale
Filled all the desert with inviolable voice.
The AS You Like It the Duke praises the very discomforts of the forest on the ground that they afford an unmediated reality: no flattering rhetoric here. But at the same time his speech is marked by a pronounced rhetorical elegance and the imagery he uses, tongues in trees, sermons in stones, books in running brooks, seems to betray a courtier’s love of language. Even as he praises Nature for her pre-linguistic purity he assimilates her to language. When the Duke has finished, he is pleased to receive Amiens’ compliment:
The word ‘translate’ suggests an echo, at the level of language and thought, of the Ovidian metamorphosis of persons.Happy is your grace.
That can translate the stubbornness of fortune
Into so quiet and so sweet a style.
Similarly, Bate represents the moment when Orlando enters with drawn sword to secure food for his aged servant as turning wholly on the surprise experienced by Orlando: he expected to meet with barbarity in the forest but is instead received with courtesy. In fact the distinctively Shakespearean thing about this moment is the way in which the dramatist, having set up a simple pastoral surprise sequence, then works internally against it. For Orlando does not in fact burst in upon a scene of civil friendliness. Instead he interrupts what looks like the start of a surprisingly nasty quarrel between Jaques and Duke Senior. The moment of shocking confrontation –
Jaques. I am ambitious for a motley coat.Duke. Thou shalt have one
– is broken by a lateral interruption. Moreover it is strange that in a book on Shakespeare and Ovidian licentious imagination nothing should be said about the line, ‘The sight of lovers feedeth those in love.’ Rosalind, disguised as a boy, asks Orlando to make love to her as if she were Rosalind. This multiplication of identities produces a faintly perverse excitement. Rosalind’s line momentarily transforms the forest into a sort of erotic panopticon.
In Shakespeare's Tamburlaine’s language is empty, almost bombastic. I suspect that something more dynamic than mere reflection is before us here. Speech which would be empty ranting in almost anyone else becomes strangely full when uttered by Tamburlaine, because be is such a doer; he enacts the hyperboles and renders them soberly realistic. But when this language is transferred to Pistol, then indeed we have pure bombast and the word ‘hollow’ signals the fact of transformation
Equally sharp is Bate’s comment on Prosperous ‘farewell’ speech. This is taken straight from Ovid and has all the grandeur of an opening invocation – and yet Shakespeare places it late and turns it into a valediction. ‘The audience is given its incantatory fix only when the necessity of withdrawal is apparent.’
What then of the ethical question-mark which has hung over Ovid for so many centuries? If we think that freedom, multiplicity and pleasure are good in themselves and consider censoriousness a kind of sin we must reverse the ethical judgment of Jonson and be clear that our critical admiration of Ovid is as moral as Dr Leavis himself could ever have wished. But a certain anxiety persists. There is so much pain and so many rapes in Ovid, and the poet seems in a way not to care. Indeed the co-existence of violation and exquisite elegance, of shock and a golden remoteness, is of the essence of his amazing art – and this is less easily moralised. There is an oddly refreshing moment in this book when Bate observes that Shakespeare himself seems to have been revolted by the displays of rhetorical copiousness laid on by the ravished Lucrece. Near the end Bate writes movingly that for Ovid there is no innocence, that Shakespeare half-knows that he is right but refuses to relinquish his half-belief that he might be wrong.
The daughter of Dr Blimber in Dombey and Son loved antiquity in a spirit of learned necrophilia. ‘None of your live languages for Miss Blimber. They must be dead – stone dead – and then Miss Blimber dug them up, like a ghoul.’ One senses that many Classical scholars have actively relished the petrific lifelessness of antiquity. Ovid himself, meanwhile, is everywhere instinct with the mobility of living things. The last word of the Metamorphoses is a glorious, arrogant shout: Vivam, ‘I shall live!’
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