Greek authors celebrate Dido under the name of Elissa as the virtuous founder of Carthage. This chapter first considers the medieval tradition of Dido that Marlowe was also heir to. It demonstrates that Dido gains from being read against that tradition, which Tudor translators and printers ushered into early modern culture. This coloured Marlowe's reading of the classics and contributes to the play's rich fabric of irony and pathos. Second, the chapter shows how, although the choice of a proto-feminist stance in Dido is Ovidian in spirit, Marlowe's inventio simultaneously lies in a clever dispositio of Virgilian material. This implies that Dido's seeming inconsistencies on stage result from deeply embedded aesthetic choices. When Marlowe engages in playful intertextual games, he reflects on his own activity as a reader, a translator and a dramatist while sharing with his audience a common historical, literary and imaginary backdrop.

Richard Barnfield's epyllic poetics is important, because it hints at literary and classical effects that we do not associate with English narrative poetry of the Elizabethan 1590s. Hellens Rape displays an allusive fluency in Greek material, and a well-developed reflection on the resources of the literary prequel and of the little epic as a genre. This chapter argues that this constellation of interests was there in the poetic culture of the early 1590s. It offers a new perspective on Christopher Marlowe's Hero and Leander and the development of the poetic tradition known as Elizabethan or 'Ovidian' epyllia. To understand this one needs to reappraise the impact of the Greek epyllion on this period's poetic activities, not least through the innovative and popular classicism of Thomas Watson. This is the exploration the author proposes in the chapter, taking Richard Barnfield's mid-1590s perspective on English poetics as our guide.

From Shakespeare's odd use of one figure in one myth, this chapter considers some metamorphoses of Shakespeare and of Ovid. It has general points to reiterate about imaginative association, influence, historically diachronic descent study, as evidenced in that kind of critical work. Measure for Measure's Lucio's multiply insulting reference to Pygmalion invites us to linger over questions of allusion and interpretation in Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The chapter explores how the unpleasant crack in the mouth of the chancer, Lucio, came to be there; and what it implies for the circumstances of this play, but also for interpretation more generally. 'Allusion' raises many of the difficulties familiar from studies of 'influence': here, too, one must beware of mistaking a resemblance for an apparent line of direct descent. So the chapter looks at a slightly less short extract and the interpretative difficulty of noticing both apparent presences and real absences.

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book shares Yves Peyré's concentration on historically informed close reading in order to identify and understand the multiple layers that modify mythological texts from generation to generation. It also offers fresh perspectives on classical mythology as it informed the writings of Shakespeare and his contemporaries over a period that ranges from the 1580s to the 1630s, from Christopher Marlowe to Thomas Heywood. Focusing on interweaving processes in early modern appropriations of myth, the book draws on a variety of approaches to ask how the uses of mythological stories enabled writers to play with representations of history, gender and desire. Building on recent research in different areas of early modern studies, the book seeks to heighten awareness of multi-directional interactions in the perception and reappropriation of classical mythology in Elizabethan and Jacobean culture.

Chapter 5 focuses on what appears to be one of the most conscious responses to the Burkean challenge: the invention of the panorama by the Irish-Scottish painter Robert Barker in the late 1780s. By literally removing the edges of representation, and immersing its viewers within an uninterrupted circular view, the panorama created a striking illusion of reality which, at least while the medium was still novel, caused unprecedented spectatorial thrills. While the medium could be linked to a tradition of illusion and immersion which predated the Enlightenment reflexion on the sublime, Barker clearly saw its relevance as a means to deny the limitations of painting. The chapter’s analyses of programmes, narratives and descriptions of panoramas by Robert Barker, Henry Aston Barker, Robert Ker Porter and Robert Burford suggest that this conception of the panorama as the most adequate pictorial vehicle of the sublime was to endure for several decades.

The chapter examines intellectual interactions between Burke and Reynolds and contrasts their conceptions of the sublime, in order to determine the extent of Burke’s influence on his friend. Reynolds’s own conception of the sublime is shown to be solidly anchored in the neoclassical tradition and its assimilation of the sublime to the ‘great style’ as well as to Michelangelo’s terribilità. Yet, one may discern ways in which the Enquiry’s irrationalism filtered into Reynolds’s own theory of art, which suggests that he played a part in mediating his friend’s aesthetics for the Royal Academy of Arts. Reynolds’s reconciliation of the neoclassical notion of the ‘great style’ with a new emphasis on imagination and intensity of affect is then understood as one of the first stages in the development of ‘Burkean’ academic productions, which flourished from the mid-1770s onwards.