“The musical confusion of hounds and echoes in conjunction” : Intertextual friction in Elizabethan rewritings of the myth of Actceon

Abstract

Focusing on the uses of the myth of Actæon in Edmund Spenser’s Mutabilite Cantos, a sonnet (Amour 35) from Drayton’s Ideas Mirrour and William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, this paper seeks to analyse the interplay between “eclectic” and “heuristic” modes of imitation (Thomas M. Greene). More specifically, my argument is that the reader’s difficulty in determining whether imitation is “eclectic” or “heuristic” originates in what could be called a process of “friction” between the text and the intertext(s). The notion of eclectic imitation, in particular, needs to be refined. The combination of intertextual references makes the text harder to interpret ; what is the relative importance of each intertextual reference? Put together, do those references constitute networks of meaning? The answers to these questions are determined by the text, but also by the reader’s background. The frictions between the text and the intertext(s) can therefore generate friction between modes of interpretation.