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Ovid and the Indifferent Lovers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Frederick H. Candelaria
Frederick H. Candelaria*
Affiliation:
University of Oregon
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Extract

The widespread influence of Ovid's Amoves in the Renaissance is well known. In this note, I hope to show how, directly or indirectly, the fourth elegy of the second book brings together four poets not ordinarily associated. Ovid's elegy may well have served Marlowe, Donne, Suckling, and Herrick as a model for a pose that became a commonplace in Renaissance poetry, the stance of the indifferent lover.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance News , Volume 13 , Issue 4 , Winter 1960 , pp. 294 - 297
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1960

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References

1 Ovidi Nasonis, P., Amores, II, iv, 9–10; 33-40Google Scholar. Ed. Franco Munari (Firenze, 1955), pp.41-42-

2 Ovid's Elegies translated by Christopher Marlowe, together with the Epigrams of Sir John Davies, ed. Hugh Macdonald (London, 1925), p. ii.

3 Ibid., pp. 33-34.

4 The Poems of John Donne, ed. Herbert J. C. Grierson (Oxford, 1912), p. 12. All references to Donne's poems are to this edition.

5 The Works of Sir John Suckling, ed. A. Hamilton Thompson (London, 1910), p. 15. Dr. Kathryn Anderson McEuen suggests that the lover's roving fancy in this poem is indebted to Strato's epigram in the Greek Anthology (XII, 198). See her work, Classical Influence upon the Tribe of Ben (Cedar Rapids, 1939), p. 231. Though the epigram may be a source of the commonplace thought of the poem, it would appear that the Amores furnishes a source more immediately at hand.

6 The Poetical Works of Robert Herrick, ed. L. C. Martin (Oxford, 1956), p. 11. All references to Herrick's poems are to this edition. Professor Martin duly notes that Ovid is the source of this lyric on p. 499.

7 Among the many poems addressed individually to the different mistresses in the Hesperides, three are directed in the plural to his many, but unnamed, mistresses: To his Mistresses (p. 10 and another poem of the same title on p. 20), and To his lovely Mistresses (p. 222). Indicating the variety of his loves, he catalogs some of his many beloveds, naming them in Upon the losse of his Mistresses (pp. 15-16).