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INTERACTING WITH EROS : EROTIC MYTHOLOGY IN EARLY MODERN DRAMA AND RENAISSANCE LITERATURE AND ART
In England and Italy, during the second half of the 16th century, the labyrinth, a symbol with an ambivalently erotic potential, embodies a perpetual quest for meaning in a changing world. This paper sets out to explore forms of representation of the labyrinth, including those that are implicit, in its interaction with Eros: How do the lascivious Pasiphae or the unfaithful Theseus interact with the erotic significances of the dedalean twists and turnings?
Ilaria Andreoli (Florida State University), "Ovid's Meta-metamorphosis: Book Illustration and Circulation of Erotic Iconographical Patterns" Ovid's Metamorphoses, already widely spread in manuscript form during the medieval period, was one of the best-selling titles published during the first phase of printed book production, especially in illustrated form. The new laws of typographical mise-en-page not only deeply modified traditional text-image relationship, but provoked an iconographical crystallization of the Ovidian tales, the erotic ones in particular, that was to become a model. Stemming from the illustrated incunabula and the Venetian, Lyonnese and Flemish 16th-century editions, these models were found in all parts of Europe where they influenced major arts as well as ornamental ones. My paper will highlight exchanges, filiations and innovations, to show how iconographical decisions were made in different editorial contexts. The spaces in which iconographical models circulated between the 15th and the 17th centuries, and the motives behind the choice of this or that model, will be presented in a variety of artistic expressions, from fresco to canvas painting, from ceramic to prints, and from enamel to marble sculpture.
Claire Bardelmann (Université de Metz), "Eros and Echo in some Echo Songs of the Renaissance" Echoes were acoustic phenomena of renewed and vivid interest in the Renaissance. The natural sciences, of which music was a branch, studied the physical properties of echoes. The musical tradition of the echo piece accordingly uses echoes as acoustic curiosities. Yet the most popular form of the echo piece, the echo song, mainly hinges on the symbolic treatment of the nymph Echo, as reflected by the moralisations of the myth in Renaissance mythography as well as by its literary use in the pastoral. Most notably, echo songs pinpoint the link between two of the interpretations of Echo - as the voice of unrequited love and as the 'breath of God' (Reynolds, Mythomysthes, 1632) and some of the interpretations of Eros - as the intractable god of love and as the cosmogonic Eros. The conventions of the echo song illustrate the ambivalence of Echo's malleable voice and its capacity to shift from human to divine love.
Leonard Barkan (Princeton University), "Picturing the Invisible: Painting and Theatricality on Shakespeare's Stage" A thing may be invisible because it is intrinsically immaterial - like female chastity. Or because, in the context of theater, one does not possess the technology to make it visible - like a royal barge on the Nile. Or because, even though it is both material and technically produceable, its representation is forbidden - like sexual intercourse. This paper will analyze the frequent presence of inset works of visual art or pictorial descriptions in Shakespeare's plays as an index to various senses of loss or impossibility. In a generic sense, the artfully crafted image is a kind of supplement to the spare offerings that Shakespeare's theater can materially present to its audience; in a cultural sense, elaborately beautiful works of art are famously available in Italy but relatively rare in England. By considering a wide range of these moments, I hope to raise questions about the limits of theater as Shakespeare understood them, and (as my examples suggest) about what may be the fundamentally erotic basis of these unrepresentables.
Catherine Belsey (Cardiff University), "Shakespeare and the Myth of Venus" Shakespeare does not put Venus on the stage, but stories about her, inherited from Ovid, constitute a repertoire of allusions in his work. Both object and cause of desire, the goddess of love is also seen as herself desiring; she is thus the personification as well as the source of passion. Myth promises to give definitive form to powerful human experiences by tracing them back to an imagined point of origin. And yet, as narrative repeatedly retold, myth constantly redefines what it sets out to pin down. Shakespeare's reinscription of the classical mythology of love reveals how far eroticism is subject to history.
Sarah A. Brown (Anglia Ruskin University ), "Queering Pygmalion: Ovid, Euripides and The Winter's Tale" In several Renaissance texts, most notably The Winter's Tale, Pygmalion's statue is invoked within a context of veiled or overt homoeroticism. In this paper I will explore the reasons for this association between two kinds of non-standard sexuality, statuphilia and homosexuality, focusing on the inherent resonances of the myth itself, on its context within the larger narrative of Ovid's Metamorphoses on the way in which its Nachleben has become entwined with that of Euripides' Alcestis.
While erotic mythology appealed to readers and theatre-goers, and was the subject of many paintings in the Renaissance, it raised difficulties for early modern mythographers and theoreticians. Seen from their detractors' moral point of view, eroticism was identified with debauchery, an accusation which jeopardized not only the promotion of classical myth, but also the defence of literature, based as it often was on classical authorities. This paper will look at the way those writers negotiated the erotic dimension of mythology in their apologies and prefaces. It will examine the vocabulary they used, the examples they chose, and the strategies of justification they put forward.
Shakespeare overtly mentions the god Priapus only in Pericles, for which the playwright's authorship hasn't even been entirely proved - some may argue that George Wilkins's hand in it explains why the god isn't explicitly referred to elsewhere in the corpus. Still, I intend to analyze Shakespeare's use of Priapus in Pericles while contextualizing this figure within his Complete Works (thus identifying implicit "avatars" of the god), and on a larger scale, within Renaissance arts and mythographies. The myth of Priapus is somehow paradoxical: his advantageous proportions make him both the respected idol of generation and gardens, as well as a laughable grotesque mock-God of sexuality.
Tania Demetriou (Trinity College, Oxford), "Encounters with Nausicaa" This paper will aim to explore aspects of the early modern literary life of the Homeric figure of Nausicaa. I will begin with a look at what I think is Nausicaa's mapping onto two female figures in Spenser's Faerie Queene and at how Spenser negotiates between his sources in those instances. I will look, that is, at the way the episode involving Nausicaa in Homer's Odyssey is read (and eroticised) by Spenser in a way that is informed and shaped by its famous later imitations and interpretations. I will then turn to two dramatic incarnations of Nausicaa - in Shakespeare's The Tempest and Fletcher's The Sea Voyage, which imitates the Shakespearean play - attempting to understand the nature of the playwrights' literary imitation here, but also the particular fascination that imitating this Homeric episode holds for authors during this period.
Sean Keilen (Princeton University): title and abstract forthcoming
Andy Kesson (Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, University of Kent): "'Cupid, what hast thou done ?' The career of the god of love in John Lyly's plays"
Cupid appears in four out of Lyly's eight extant plays, more than any other character. This paper examines the god's dramatic character in three of Lyly's plays, asking if a coherent career may be seen of the "peevish boy" in Sapho and Phao, the "little god" in Gallathea, and, in Love's Metamorphosis, the "great god" and "absolute authority", whom "all the gods tremble at". This examination will demonstrate a shift in Cupid's status and stature as performed before the queen in the 1580s, coterminous with and articulating the fragmentation of the queen's own socialised sexuality.
Jane Kingsley-Smith (University of Roehampton), "Cupid, Infantilism and Maternal Desire on the Early Modern Stage" "Cupid, though he be a child, is no babie" - despite this insistence in Lyly's Gallathea, early modern drama seems often to have confused the kinds of desire aroused by Cupid-as-a-boy with his appeal as an infant. This paper considers how maternal love is exploited by an infantilised Cupid in order to implicate the mother-figure in heterosexual, adult desire (as in Marlowe's Dido, Queen of Carthage), but also how it blurs the distinctions between those desires (as in Lyly's Sapho and Phao), to activate a powerful fantasy of nurturance for both male and female spectators.
This communication will explore the process of "iconographical translation" of the figure of the bathing nymph in the arts of representation in the Renaissance. The wealth of the iconography devoted to the Bathing Nymph, due to the Franco-Italian influence of the School of Fontainebleau engravings, nourishes the Renaissance imagination and sets it in motion through a subtle combination of motifs drawn from both the venatio and the chasse d'amour. Depending on the context, the bathing nymph is close to Diana or to Venus. This dangerous intimacy sets the myths in tension in terms of representation, allowing in turn an active interpretation of the new erotic figure thus created.
"Tell me where is Fancy bred The song that accompanies Bassanio's choice of the casket where Portia's heart is locked in The Merchant of Venice (III.2.63-64) indirectly addresses the issue of the tension, or gap, between representation and performance. Similarly, Cleopatra on her barge, who is said by Enobarbus to be 'O'er picturing that Venus where we see/The fancy out-work nature' (Antony and Cleopatra, II.2.207-208) embodies what Michael Neill calls "a fantasy of the limitless" (A&C, 1994, p. 86). As in the prologue to Henry V, Shakespeare invites his spectators/readers to work "on [their] imaginary forces [...] / And make imaginary puissance". And indeed, "All is imaginary", Venus realizes in Venus and Adonis (l. 597). "Il n'y a pas d'acte sexuel", as Lacan intriguingly puts it. So, this paper will claim that erotic fancy/fantasy in Shakespeare, in its more positive aspects, is mainly Saturnalian, i.e. festive in origin and spirit, thus opening the way to multiple creation and re-creation. If, in its darker sides, as in the Sonnets, Othello or King Lear, it is presented as pathological and destructive, it remains a powerful source of invention and imagination at the core of Cleopatra's "infinite variety".
Jean-Luc Nardone (Université Toulouse II), "Michelangelo's Senile Eroticism" In a short essay published in Zurich in 1950 entitled Michelangelo in seinen Dichtungen [Michaelangelo in his poems], Thomas Mann, working from a new German translation of the Italian's Rime, proposed a most stimulating analysis of the artist's portrait of the beautiful princess Vittoria Colonna, to whom he had been close in her lifetime : « a marvellous drawing », to quote Mann, « with an energetic mouth that was so sensually beautiful » that it revealed a « preference for creatures whose faces divinely blended virility and femininity ». Bearing this theory in mind, I propose to explore the eroticism of the ageing Michelangelo, more particularly in his poetry, without ignoring his paintings and sculptures (which have been more frequently studied), in the light of a possible androgyny whose polysemy I shall endeavour to define.
This paper will aim to reconsider Shakespeare's Ganymede as a variant of the myth of Ganymede. The Ganymede myth, which has been shown as concentrating "the erotics of Humanism" (Leonard Barkan), will be considered in its interactions with a cluster of myths which, taking gender indeterminacy as a paradigm for artistic virtuosity, seem to fuse erotic and aesthetic pleasure.
"Arme him Priapus, with thy powerfull Mace
Laetitia Sansonetti (Université Paris III Sorbonne nouvelle), "Interpreting Desire in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis" I would like to argue that Venus and Adonis is a reflection on how to interpret signs: words and bodies are unreliable signs that can be twisted to suit the intentions of the interpreter. The traditional conflict between carnal love and chastity is ironically translated into the rhetorical exchange of clichés between Venus and Adonis to insist on the breaking of syntheses caused by desire. I will analyze the processes of selection and re-elaboration at work in the creation of a reluctant Adonis, within the Bate-Martindale debate over Ovidian intertextuality. In delegating part of the interpretation of her own myth to Venus herself, the narrator underlines the limits of erotic rhetoric.
The referential richness of Titania's encounter with Bottom is a critical commonplace, yet the particular order of parody within its exploration of eroticism and power between human and animal has escaped attention. Its literary, mythic and visual allusions, including often unheard ones to Spenser, Giulio Romano and the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (both text and engravings), reveal a trope of mutual enslavement and victimhood under the power of a magus, complemented by a scopophilic reader. Shakespeare's serioludic tone reveals the compound uses of parody simultaneously to liberate dark desire and sacramentalise the erotic, forming part of a key tradition of Renaissance erotic aesthetics.
In this paper, I will show how Shakespeare explores the emotional and cognitive effects of "lively" images on beholders, reflecting cultural beliefs and fears about the power of images to transport the mind, move the passions, inspire eros, and corrupt the soul. In Shakespeare's drama, a character's denial of an image's potency, as when Lady Macbeth insists "The sleeping and the dead / Are but as pictures. 'Tis the eye of childhood / That fears a painted devil" is always betrayed as misguided. Characters discover within themselves strong emotional responses to images that lead first to a state of raptness and then, in some cases, to action of tremendous consequence for good or ill. While Shakespeare depicts encounters between spectators and artists' images (e.g., Bassanio entranced by "fair Portia's counterfeit", Leontes mocked and transported by Hermione's "stone", Lucrece weeping feelingly before "a piece / Of skilful painting"), he exhaustively explores the mind's capacity for image-making, revealing what Plato called the "painter in the soul" at work. Enobarbus's coy, eroticized verbal portrait of Cleopatra represents one mode of imaginative painting and beholding, which inspires erotic hunger through a play of absence and presence, as well as aesthetic appreciation. Macbeth's horrid images, which erupt uncontrollably in his mind, reflect another, more dangerous, kind of internal painting and a set of responses ultimately antithetical to art's moral and aesthetic purposes. Macbeth's imaginative painting transforms him into a murderer, figuratively associated with Tarquin (his "rapt" engagement with images leads to the ravishing of his object) and Confusion, whose "masterpiece," the apprentice's skilled offering to admit him to the coveted guild, provokes in his audience as well as himself the terror of a gorgon.
Two moments inspired by myths from the Metamorphoses, Ino and Athamas, and Hermaphroditus and Salmacis, are arguably among the most erotic in the play. In one, snakes which are instruments of vengeance, invade a girl's body while her would-be lover, whom she has just frustrated, stands by smiling; in the other, a fairy queen wraps herself about a working man with the head of an ass, in an attempt to seduce him. Both moments raise problems to which no solution is provided, and are reminders of the complexity of a comedy which leaves many questions unanswered and which at some points looks forward to Hamlet.
Cross-references to myths of love chart the courses of Shakespeare's lovers. Two sets of lovers are emblematic of Lysander's observation that "The course of true love never did run true": Pyramus and Thisbe, and Hero and Leander, which the Renaissance knew mainly through Ovid's Metamorphoses and Heroides, in the original Latin text, in the respective translations of Golding and Turbervile, as well as in narrative poems, such as those by Thomas Proctor or Christopher Marlowe. Through an exploration of the two couples' presence in Shakespeare, this paper sets out to show how the two tales interact. Over and beyond their apparent parallels, they produce complementary and indeed contrasting perspectives that illustrate the complexity of love, in its expression and perception, hence the difficulty of the course of love running true. .
This paper will examine the circulation of the works of Pietro Aretino in early modern Britain and their impact on the developing cultural scene there. Published in Italian by John Wolfe's press in London in the 1580s, several of Aretino's gender-bending comedies and his erotically-charged Ragionamenti eluded the censorship that would have greeted any such work written in English. That interest in Aretino was high among those capable of reading Italian in Britain is evident in the presence of one of Wolfe's editions in the library of William Cecil, Lord High Treasurer and Queen Elizabeth's chief advisor; and by the extensive citation of almost all of Aretino's printed work in the second edition of John Florio's Italian-English dictionary, Queen Anna's New World of Words (1611). Aretino's absence from Italian presses and book sellers following the introduction of the papal Index of Forbidden Books in 1559, this literature found a new public in Britain, ready to both decode and re-employ its complex intermingling of erotic play and social critique.
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