MYTH AND METAMORPHOSIS IN STEPHEN GOSSON'S SCHOOLE OF ABUSE

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In The Schoole of Abuse, Stephen Gosson employs his knowledge of antiquity rather than the authority of the Scriptures to attack ‘the abuses of Poets, Pypers, and Players’. Presenting himself as a manly warrior rather than an effeminate scholar, Gosson claims that he has given the enemy ‘a volley of prophane writers to beginne the Skirmishe’, and will beat them ‘with their owne weapons’. Although he centres his attack on the stage, he condemns all poets as masters of appearances who corrupt their audiences by masking the truth. This paper investigates the role of ancient literature as Gosson's weapon in the attempt to unmask the poets’ deceit, arguing that the excess of classical allusions in his writing enacts the ‘wanton’ spectacles of the early modern English stage. Paradoxically, Gosson uses the attraction of ancient poetry to persuade his audience that art is dangerous and illusory, comparing poems with the ‘Cuppes of Circes that turne reasonable creatures into brute Beastes’. While sharing the antitheatricalists’ anxieties about the social and gender disorder of the theatre, Gosson is troubled by the ambiguous influence of classical aesthetics, particularly the use of myth and metamorphosis, on sixteenth-century English culture.