Ovid, Shakespeare, and 'The Latinist' (Part One)

Daphne is a nymph. And she has the misfortune to catch the eye of the god Apollo, who has been shot by one of Cupid’s darts that makes him fall in love. Interestingly, Daphne has been shot by a dart as well, that makes her resistant to love.

When Apollo sees her, he begins a pursuit. And it’s quite a lengthy description in book one of this race between the two of them. Daphne, she’s good, she runs fast and more or less evades Apollo. And there are points when Apollo was kind of calling after her and saying, “You know who I am, I’m the god Apollo, I’m not just anyone,” but to no avail.

She tires and Apollo gains on her. She nearly makes it to the river, and one assumes safety, but he’s gaining too fast. And she calls out to the gods to turn her into something else, something to save her, and she becomes a tree. In the final lines of the Apollo and Daphne section, Apollo himself translates his own sexual lust into a kind of adoration of the laurel tree. The laurel then becomes the symbol of victory and associated with Apollo.

So that’s the basic outline of the Apollo and Daphne story, hugely inspirational in terms of visual art, both in antiquity and through the Renaissance. And of course, Prins in his novel makes quite a lot of the Bernini sculpture, that extraordinary sculpture in Rome.

ep: Thinking about Apollo specifically, this (left) is an illustration of an actor in the role of Apollo from the early 19th century, and what is not immediately apparent is that this is actually a woman playing Apollo. This is Madame Lucia Elizabeth Vestri, who was a popular actor at the time known for parts where she played a man. It speaks to this idea that the figure can appear in so many different guises through history and gestures towards that transformation of an actor into a role and a woman into a man and a God.

WT: I think this is fascinating, this image. I was really struck by this because there’s something obviously highly eroticizing about a beeches part from a kind of heteroerotic or perhaps queer point of view, that you have a woman allowed to kind of inhabit a sort of more kind of sexualized role because she’s playing a man.

What I’m also seeing in this image of a 19th -century, 18th -century female Apollo is quite a long tradition of European cultures trying to get their heads around the kind of darker and wackier elements of Ovid. Ovid is such a fundamental part of the humanist project in Renaissance Europe and later, a major element in classical educations, but it’s also mad and disturbing and runs completely counter to almost every sort of Christian value and sort of literary ethics that people are trained to adhere to.

From the Middle Ages onwards, as we see in The Latinist, the literature goes through a process of filtration through mostly medieval monasteries who are copying and recopying these texts for  the best part of a millennium until they enter the printed public sphere. During that time, you find commentator after commentator bending over backwards to provide glosses and explanations for why Ovid is actually quite a moral and very Christian writer, really, if you just read him in the right way. And this is a tradition that is known as the Ovid moralisé tradition, or the sort of moralized Ovid, the cleaned up, the sort of laundered Ovid, where it’s not so much about mad erotic kind of pursuit and weird queer transformation, but about metaphors for good Christian life.

This image is not part of that particular tradition, but it’s I think definitely part of a tradition of cleaning up and softening the edges of Ovid and making it less brutal and less transgressive, and less erotic, and less misogynistic, and less queer, and less all of these sort of values and qualities that are there in the text, but that are not seen as suitable, either in Shakespeare’s time, but certainly by the age of sensibility as we see in this image.