Sexuality and Citizenship: Metamorphosis in Elizabethan Erotic Verse, and: Searching Shakespeare: Studies in Culture and Authority (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Sexuality and Citizenship: Metamorphosis in Elizabethan Erotic Verse, and: Searching Shakespeare: Studies in Culture and Authority R. S. White Ellis, Jim , Sexuality and Citizenship: Metamorphosis in Elizabethan Erotic Verse, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2003; cloth; pp. viii, 292; RRP US$58; ISBN 0802087353. Cohen, Derek , Searching Shakespeare: Studies in Culture and Authority, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2003; cloth; pp. xv, 195; RRP US$53; ISBN 0802087787 Beginning in 1589 with Lodge's Scillaes Metamorphosis and ending abruptly with Beaumont's The Metamorphosis of Tobacco in 1602, the English epyllion or erotic narrative poem, is a fragile genre confined to the 1590s. Its best-known examples were partly a by-product of the theatre-closures due to the plague, when celebrated dramatists needed to use their 'brand names' in turning their hands to commercial publishing in order to earn a living. Marlowe, Shakespeare, Marston and Beaumont all produced examples of these poems. Invariably based on episodes from classical writing, often Ovidian metamorphosis in particular, the genre is generally marked by its comic and satiric tone. [End Page 163] Jim Ellis's book begins on firm ground, as he develops an argument that the poems were written with a readership drawn from the Inns of Court in mind. This is convincing since book stalls thronged around the Inns and, as the book demonstrates, both the study of law and the epyllia give a central place to rhetoric. The works also anticipate sophisticated readers with a thorough classical education and a witty, even cynical bent. Most of them, like the famous examples Venus and Adonis and Hero and Leander, focus on 'the metamorphosis of the youth', an innocent young man's sometimes comically abortive passage to adult sexual experience. As the young man is initiated into sexual desire, so his skill in rhetoric advances, with comic consequences in Marlowe's Hero and Leander. Such skill in its turn leads to a maturing subjectivity. Add to these ingredients erotic, indeed homoerotic, and sometimes pornographic elements (especially marked in Marston's Metamorphosis of Pigmalion's Image), and it is not difficult to see the poems being written to appeal to young and clever, male law students. While focusing on these relatively familiar issues, Ellis's account is a useful addition to commentary. However, when in the second half he turns to 'The Erotics of Political Fraternity' and consideration of citizenship and nationhood, his territory will strike some readers as less firm. The discussion of Beaumont's straightforward Salmacis and Hermaphroditus begins promisingly by examining the kind of scopophilia or 'sexual watching' that marks the genre, and develops by invoking the discovery of perspective in art, again something which is mirrored in an epyllion like Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece. But it may be strained and unnecessary then to use Lacan to argue for a new kind of 'political subjectivity' in the poem's ecphrasis. Similarly in the discussion of R.B.'s Orpheus His Journey to Hell, we hear the voice of Lacan rather more insistently than that of R.B.: 'That the stories of becoming a rhetorician (and thus a lawyer, legislator, humanist) are overlaid onto stories of erotic transformations suggests that the poems are involved in policing or renegotiating the boundaries of desire within their culture' (p. 171). On the other hand, Ellis's revaluation of three epyllia that deal with rape (including Shakespeare's), written at a time when the law was shifting this crime from the sphere of a crime against property and family to a violation, even a murder, of the self, is welcome. For too long The Rape of Lucrece has been persistently regarded as a 'mere' exercise in rhetoric. One might question Ellis's direction in finding an ideology of republicanism in its struggle against tyranny, while respecting the seriousness of his enquiry. However, in each chapter, by taking the extra step of locating in the epyllia 'a form of republican politics' (p. [End Page 164] 239), Ellis may be moving just beyond the playful, anti-Petrarchan, and in some ways anti-epic genre that the bulk of his book illuminates. 'Nation' in Shakespeare's plays is a subject that has been dealt...