WILLIAM P. WEAVER. Untutored Lines: The Making of the English Epyllion.

Abstract

Shakespeare’s Malvolio is troubled by the liminal transgressions embodied by the girlish young man who arrives at his mistress’ gate; Cesario, he complains, is ‘not yet old enough for a man, nor young enough for a boy; as a squash is before ‘tis a peascod, or a codling when ‘tis almost an apple’ (Twelfth Night, I.v.156–9). ‘Standing … between boy and man’ (160), male and female, the disguised Viola resembles those ‘tender boy[s]’ (Venus & Adonis, 32) at the threshold of maturity who populate the pastoral world of the Renaissance epyllion. These vogue erotic mythological narrative poems (in which, to appropriate from Francis Meres, ‘the sweete wittie soule of Ovid lives’) were written and circulated around the Inns of Court in the 1590s and their readership shared, as William P. Weaver demonstrates in this scholarly study, ‘a common training in a specific set of rhetorical exercises, which these poets repeatedly exploit[ed] to represent [their] precocious boy orators’ (114). It became, Untutored Lines persuasively argues, ‘the literary genre through which poets represented rites de passage from boyhood to adolescence’ (3).