Sarah Carter: Ovidian Myth and Sexual Deviance in Early Modern English Literature

• Dieter Mehl

The fruitful and many-sided impact of Ovid’s imaginative tales of mythic metamorphoses on the literature of the English Renaissance has more than once been described in recent criticism. Sarah Carter’s review of the particular attraction to Elizabethans of Ovid’s rich treasure-house of alluring if not scandalous story material is chiefly informed by her interest in sexual deviance, defined by her as “deviating from standard behavior or the correct ‘path’” (p. 5), transgressing social, moral, or physical boundaries.

She finds this chiefly in Ovid’s Metamorphoses tales of Philomela, Hermaphroditus, Pygmalion, Myrrha and Adonis, as well as in the Rape of Lucrece, retold in the Fasti. The book offers a perceptive survey of Elizabethan versions of the Ovidian narratives of Philomela, Lucrece, Ganymede, Hermaphroditus, Pygmalion. Carter argues persuasively that the classical guise allowed Renaissance authors and readers, even the young and “officially” unspoiled novice, a much greater freedom of discourse than would normally have been permissible.