Reginald Forster's Burlesque Ovidian Epistle

Abstract

My subject here is a unique intervention in seventeenth-century Ovidianism. British Library Additional MS 61744 (headed 'Iuuenilities of some antiquity all save the twoo praefaces') is recorded only in the British Library Additional MSS Catalogue, which states that it is an 'anonymous collection of original verse and translations composed chiefly between 1643 and 1653'. The most conspicuous element of the collection is a Latin text, argument (in verse) , and burlesque translation of Ovid's Heroides XV, 'The epistle in Ouid of Sappho to Phaon illuded and playd withall' (folios 70r-80v).1 Anticipating the later Restoration drive towards parodies of the Heroides exemplified by the Ovidius Exulans, Matthew Stevenson, and Alexander Radcliffe this translation is possibly the earliest extant burlesque version of the Heroides in English. As a hitherto unnoticed addition to English Ovidianism, dowsed with the atmosphere of libertinism, it is of considerable literaryhistorical interest, indicating as it does that the late Restoration parodies have a stylistic predecessor, and that Ovid's letters were susceptible to burlesque from at least as early as the 1650s. Moreover, insofar as it marks an innovative generic departure, this acutely personal parodic response to the Heroides is quite distinct from the two other recorded manuscript versions of the Heroides from mid-to-later seventeenth-century England, both of which are essentially paraphrastic imitative exercises.2