by David Riggs
John Marlowe, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Arthur and John Moore all went to Katherine Benchkin’s house on 19 August. Widow Benchkin’s late husband had been a prosperous wool merchant and an estate agent for the cathedral. Her house was large and well furnished. Her son James, who stood to inherit the bulk of his mother’s large estate, including £320 in ready money, was also named executor of her will. Why did the widow Benchkin require four witnesses, all of them bound together by family ties, instead of the usual two? As heir and executor, James presumably wanted an ample array of witnesses in case the will was contested, as indeed it was. After the four men arrived, widow Benchkin went upstairs, fetched two wills and threw one of them in the fire. She took the other one ‘to Christopher Marlowe to read’. He read it aloud ‘plainly and distinctly’ and signed it with his own name, ‘Cristofer Marley’. It is his only extant autograph signature.
6.1 Signatures of John and Christopher Marlowe. From the will of Katherine Benchkin, 1585.
The widow Benchkin called on Christopher Marlowe because his literacy let him serve as a notary. The identity he had acquired upon returning home, at least in the eyes of his townspeople, was that of a writer. What better place and time to take up that craft than here and now, happily removed from the interminable grind of Master Norgate’s daily ‘Exercises’? What better writer to begin with than Ovid, who was rapidly becoming the leading presence in English literature? And what better poem than Ovid’s underground classic, the Amores?
Ovid’s well-earned reputation as praeceptor amoris, ‘the teacher of desire’, was anathema to schoolmasters. His collections of erotic verse remained unpublished in England until Marlowe’s third year at Cambridge, when Thomas Vautrollier brought out Latin texts of Ovid’s love poems, the Amores, Art of Love and Cure for Love. The most obscure and lascivious of these works was the Amores. This collection offered nothing whatever to the moralizing and allegorizing commentators who had rescued Ovid’s other works for Christian culture; nor had it ever been translated into any vernacular language. Medieval library cataloguers called the Amores ‘without title’ (the literal meaning of Ovid’s Amores is ‘lovemaking’). Humanist educators could ill afford to reveal that Ovid, the sage poet and philosopher, had led a life of utter debauchery. Or that he transmitted the ‘harmful eloquence’ of a drunken bawd who ‘draws chaste women to incontinence’ (I.viii.19–20). Or that he preached Lucretian materialism, proposing that ‘God is a name, no substance, feared in vain,/And doth the world in fond belief detain’ (III.iii.23–24).
The resurgence of Ovidian eroticism gave cause for alarm in Protestant England. Educators had long objected to Ovid’s licentious gods and goddesses (there are eighteen rapes in his Metamorphoses) and pagan values. Sir Philip Sidney, the great defender of poetry in Marlowe’s era, silently omits Ovid from his Apology for Poetry, despite the fact that Ovid was the most important poet in the classical tradition that Sidney set out to defend. Sidney offers no rebuttal to the charge that erotic poetry ‘abuseth men’s wit, training it to wanton sinfulness and lustful love’, and pleasing ‘an ill pleased eye with wanton shows of better hidden matters’. Instead, he rests his case with Virgil, the morally correct poet of civic virtue, and his hero Aeneas, bearing his aged father from the ruins of Troy: ‘Who readeth Aeneas, carrying old Anchises on his back, that wisheth not it were his fortune to perform so excellent an act?’
The name that springs to mind in response to Sidney’s rhetorical question is Robert Greene, another Cambridge scholar. Greene matriculated as a poor Sizar at St John’s in 1575, took his BA four years later and then migrated to Clare Hall, where his progress towards the MA soon went astray. Greene’s autobiographical pamphlets reveal that he fell in with ‘wags as lewd as myself, with whom I consumed the flower of my youth, who drew me to travel to Italy’. While abroad, Greene took up vices that were ‘abominable to declare’. Upon his return, he adopted the ‘habit of a malcontent’, like the melancholy Jaques in As You Like It, and ‘seemed so discontent that no place would please me to abide in, nor no vocation cause me to stay myself in’.
Greene had in fact discovered his vocation. Back in Cambridge, he penned his first Ovidian romance Mamillia and published it in 1583. With the inspired sense of self-promotion that never deserted him, Greene signed his dedicatory epistle to the second part of Mamillia ‘From my study in Clare Hall, the 7th of July,’ 1583, just a week after he had received his MA. During the next year, Greene rapidly became the great ‘penner of love pamphlets’ for his era. Ovid’s influence pervades this work, especially the lyric poems with which Greene interspersed his prose narratives. Here, for example, is the description of Silverstro’s lady’s breasts in Greene’s Morando (1584):
The Cnidian doves, whose white and snowy pens
Do stain the silver-streaming ivory,
May not compare with those two moving hills,
Which topped with pretty teats discover down a vale,
Wherein the god of love may deign to sleep …
The bemused eroticism and mythological conceits of these songs closely resemble Marlowe’s translation of the Amores. Towards the end of his brief life, Greene characterized himself as a repentant disciple of Ovid: ‘They which held Greene for a patron of love, and a second Ovid,’ he vowed, shall henceforth ‘think him … a Diogenes that will bark at every amorous pen’. Greene’s recantation harks back to the Cambridge years when he and Marlowe rediscovered the lovers’ guide to imperial Rome.
Marlowe’s translation of the Amores bears many traces of apprentice work. His line-for-line rendering frequently departs from the plain sense of the original, occasionally lapses into obscurity and lacks the sure metrical touch of his other verse, especially Hero and Leander, his later Ovidian poem. Although the botched translations in Marlowe’s All Ovid’s Elegies occasionally stem from errors in his Latin texts, many are his own doing. For this reason, scholars surmise that Marlowe put the Amores into English while a student at Cambridge. Ovid had served his own poetic apprenticeship in the wanton arena of erotic verse; it made sense for his young English imitator to follow in the steps of the master. The conjecture is helpful so long as it does not cast a shadow over Marlowe’s achievement. His mistranslations in All Ovid’s Elegies are far too interesting to be the result of mere youthful incompetence.
Marlowe’s own apprenticeship in verse composition had taught him to make lines that sounded like Ovid ‘for the phrase’. This criterion still held good when he translated the Amores. Ovid’s elegiac couplet contains two unrhymed Latin lines in alternating metres: the longer, ‘soaring’ hexameter followed by the ‘falling’ and evenly balanced pentameter. The end of the metrical pattern coincides with the end of the verse sentence to produce a strong sense of closure. Ovid relates the form of his elegies to their content at the outset of his Amores. He had set out to write a heroic poem, but
When in this work’s first verse I trod aloft,
Love slack’d my muse, and made my numbers soft.
(I.i.21–22)
Love takes Ovid from the stately measures of epic and tragedy to the attenuated rhythms of elegiac love poetry. The first line equates poetry with aspiring potency; the second, with the fall into laxity and impotence. Marlowe’s end-rhyme on ‘aloft / soft’ clinches the point with a pair of bawdy puns. Where earlier English translators of Ovid used rhymed lines containing twelve or fourteen syllables, Marlowe employed a ten-syllable iambic line – that is, each of the five feet normally contains an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one. The iambic pentameter line made it easier for Marlowe and the many poets who followed his example – John Donne, Andrew Marvell and Alexander Pope, among others – to imitate the tightly knit structure of Ovid’s elegiac couplets.
The work of translating 2,400 lines of Latin couplets into the same number of rhymed English verses demanded a large outlay of time and energy. Many of the mistakes in Marlowe’s translation reflect the tight constraints of line-by-line translation and the rhymin
g couplet form. His most notorious howler comes midway through Ovid’s tribute to the power of poetry. Where Ovid writes
Song bursts the serpent’s jaws apart and robs him of his fangs,
and sends the waters rushing back upon their source
Marlowe translates:
Snakes leap by verse from caves of broken mountains,
And turnèd streams run backwards to their fountains.
(II.i.25–26)
Having submitted to the discipline of line-by-line translation, Marlowe shed the burden of literal fidelity to the original. The first line of his couplet makes the leap from translation to imitation and falls short. Ovid’s serpent has a reason for being in the line; the defanged snake shows that song has power to charm the savage beast. Marlowe’s snakes are just freakish. Yet even when Marlowe stumbles, he continues to fashion stylish heroic couplets. His muddled lines preserve, even sharpen, the antithetical structure of an elegiac couplet: snakes leap out of broken mountain caves, streams run backward to their sources.
Marlowe’s Latinate constructions create the impression that he is making an exact replica of Ovid’s Amores; in fact, he frequently substitutes a phantom original of his own imagining in place of his source text. His main concern is not to reproduce what Ovid said, but to demonstrate his mastery of Ovid’s style. When Marlowe gets it right, he sounds brilliant. Compare the two poets on what it feels like to be impotent in bed. After Ovid’s partner has done everything she can to arouse him, he writes
Tacta tamen veluti gelida mea membra cicuta
Segnia propsitum destituere meum.
(But my body, as if drugged with chill hemlock,
was paralysed and failed to achieve my intent)
Marlowe translates:
Yet like as if cold hemlock I had drunk,
It mockèd me, hung down the head, and sunk.
(III.vi.13–14)
The Latinate word order (object-subject-verb), unbroken cadence and sonority of Marlowe’s first line registers the mounting anxiety focused in the ominously disyllabic ‘hemlock’. The second, with its broken cadences and three separate verb clauses, mimics the downward course of Ovid’s shrinking member towards the decisive end-rhyme on ‘sunk’.
Marlowe is more direct and coarse than Ovid, and likelier to use smutty language. The English poet’s will to lurid self-display revived Ovid’s resolve to exhibit his own bad qualities before the Roman reading public: ‘For I confess, if that might merit favour, / Here I display my lewd and loose behaviour’ (II.iv.3–4). Like Ovid, the self-styled ‘poet of my own wantonness’, Marlowe reached out to an audience of eager sexual neophytes:
… far hence be the severe:
You are unapt my looser lines to hear.
Let maids whom hot desire to husbands lead,
And rude boys touched with unknown love, me read
(II.i.3–6)
Ovid challenged the emperor Caesar Augustus’s attempt to regulate the sexual behaviour of Roman citizens. Writing in opposition to the Julian laws of 18 BC, which criminalized adultery, Ovid appealed to a libertine counter-nation governed by desire. Chastity, he argues, has grown uncouth and old-fashioned:
Perhaps the Sabines rude, when Tatius reigned,
To yield their love to more than one disdained;
Now Mars doth rage abroad without all pity,
And Venus rules in her Aeneas’ city.
(I.vii.39–42)
The poet’s freedom of speech upholds the right of individual subjects to live in a state of ‘liberty’ – a key term for both Ovid and Marlowe. When Envy chides Ovid for neglecting his civic duties, he replies: ‘Thy scope is mortal, mine eternal fame,/That all the world may ever chant my name’ (I.xv.7–8). Ovid’s poems of desire provoked the emperor to banish him, an act that made the poet more famous than ever. Where Virgil celebrated Roman national greatness, Ovid elevated cultural history over war and politics, asserted the poet’s claim to represent the nation and set his personal vision of Rome against the official mythology of the state.
Marlowe’s rendition of Ovid’s notorious ‘poem without title’ reactivated the ancient quarrel between the poet and the prince. The very act of translation forged a bond between Ovid and Marlowe, who revived the Roman poet’s radical commitment to sexual licence and freedom of speech. There would not be another printed English version of the Amores until the later seventeenth century. If Marlowe had published Ovid’s elegies under his own name, he too would have been subject to punishment at the hands of the state – hence his decision either to keep the work in manuscript, or publish it with a clandestine printer, during his own lifetime. Six years after Marlowe’s death, when his Elegies had appeared in print, Archbishop Whitgift ordered all copies to ‘be presently brought to the Bishop of London to be burned’ in St Paul’s Churchyard.
Marlowe’s Ovid survives in two formats. Certain of Ovid’s Elegies (c. 1599) contains translations of just ten poems, arranged in a new sequence. All Ovid’s Elegies (after 1602) covers the three books of the Amores in Ovid’s original order, and almost in their entirety. Given the constraints of line-by-line translation, the selection and ordering of Certain Elegies gave Marlowe his best opportunity to reimagine Ovid’s work in the light of his own poetic sensibility. Since the four early imprints of Marlowe’s Ovid are undated and bear foreign or spurious places of publication, we cannot be sure about the extent of his involvement in preparing them for the press. Many, perhaps all, of these books only appeared after his death. Even so, Certain Elegies bears the clear stamp of Marlowe’s authorial intelligence.
Marlowe’s ordering interweaves poetic and erotic autobiography. Read in succession, the ten poems are a meditation on poetry and passion. The poet intends to write epic, but love decides that he will compose elegies instead. In the initial run of three seduction poems, he evolves from the spotless youth who promises Corinna that ‘we will through the world be rung, / And with my name shall thine be always sung’ (I.iii.25–26) into the bold seducer who takes her ‘In summer’s heat, and mid-time of the day’ (I.v.1), and then into the disillusioned suitor who begs her ‘that what you do I may not see’ (III.xiii.35). Confronted with the corrosive effects of time, the poet takes refuge in the permanence of his art:
Verse is immortal, and shall ne’er decay.
To verse let kings give place, and kingly shows,
And banks o’er which gold-bearing Tagus flows.
Let base-conceited wits admire vile things,
Fair Phoebus lead me to the Muses’ springs.
About my head be quivering myrtle wound …
(I.xv.32–37)
Although the poet’s love is subject to time, his verse is immortal. While Ovid’s compulsion to write love poetry has made him unfit for public service, poetry elevates him above kings and kingly shows. The elegist is derided by the envious, but crowned by Apollo, the god of day and poetry. The other middle elegy in Marlowe’s arrangement, ‘To Aurora, not to hurry’, chides the Dawn for ending Ovid’s night of lovemaking. Although the poet’s dawn song cannot stay the coming of Aurora’s ‘hateful carriage’, he can at least prolong it until the goddess ‘blushed, and therefore heard me’ (I. xiii.38, 47).
The later run of three seduction poems exhibits the mature poet’s promiscuous love for the entire female sex. The rake’s progress proves even more disillusioning than his love affair with Corinna. Confessing that ‘I loathe, yet after that I loathe I run;’ he asks, ‘Nay what is she that any Roman loves / But my ambitious ranging mind approves?’ (II.iv.5, 47–48). He boasts to his friend Graecinus that he can now ‘love two women equally’ (II.x.4). But when he finally does achieve unlimited sexual satisfaction, his penis lets him down, as we have seen (III.vi.14). Marlowe’s final selection, in which Love’s captive bows down in Love’s Triumph, moves from the poet’s impotence to the omnipotence of love. If the poet begins by abandoning arms for love, he concludes with a military triumph that gives public form to his inmost compulsions.
In taking Ovid for his mentor, Marlowe became involved in the ancient rivalry between Ovid and Virgil. Ovid fashioned his own literary career in response to Virgil’s example. Ovid pays tribute to the three-part Virgilian career pattern – which proceeds from pastoral (the Eclogues) to agriculture (the Georgics) to national epic (the Aeneid) – in a memorable couplet: ‘Tityrus, and the harvest, and the arms of Aeneas, will be read / As long as Rome shall be head of all the world she triumphs over’. Turning to the course of his own career, Ovid revised Virgil’s master narrative in the light of changing cultural conditions. Ovid’s readership lives in a modern imperial metropolis, where Mars rages abroad on the front lines, ‘And Venus rules in her Aeneas’ city’ (I.viii.41–42). Where Virgil spent his poetic apprenticeship writing pastoral, the genre of innocence, Ovid began at the other end of the moral spectrum, with elegy, the loss of innocence and the onset of desire. Where Virgil proceeded to write a national epic, Ovid’s apprenticeship in ‘weak elegy’ prepares him to work on the ‘greater ground’ of tragedy (his lost Medea) and cosmological epic (his Metamorphoses).
