Arthur Golding's Metamorphoses: myth in an Elizabethan political context1

Abstract

Modern scholarship has been divided over the literary quality and merits of Arthur Golding's 1567 translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses. While the text was popular in its day, most modern students find it rather odd. This paper argues that Golding's text conforms to a larger strategy exhibited in his oeuvre, and that failure to examine the Elizabethan Metamorphoses cognizant of the translator's other texts is to divorce it from a critical exegetical framework. Rather than being ‘odd’, Golding's translation served a literary agenda that can be explained and analysed once the crucial context is supplied. In order to place Golding's Metamorphoses in the perspective of his life's work, this essay examines his original writings, dedications, paratexts, and so on, to construct a coherent series of statements regarding religion, politics, society, and the purpose of literature in a culture conflicted by the debates of the Reformation. The authors also provide a textual analysis of the myths of Byblis and Orpheus to demonstrate the manner in which Golding translated Ovid's Latin. The final result places the Elizabethan Metamorphoses within Golding's world view and explains the ‘oddness’ to the modern readership.