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Golding's Ovid, Shakespeare's ‘Small Latin,’ and the Real Object of Mockery in ‘Pyramus and Thisbe.’

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SOURCE: Taylor, Anthony Brian. “Golding's Ovid, Shakespeare's ‘Small Latin,’ and the Real Object of Mockery in ‘Pyramus and Thisbe.’” Shakespeare Survey 42 (1990): 53-64.

[In the following essay, Taylor argues that although Shakespeare made use of Golding's translation of Ovid, his “Pyramus and Thisbe” in A Midsummer Night's Dream is not a parody of Golding's poetry, but rather a kind of self-mockery poking fun at Shakespeare's own limited facility with Latin.]

I

In an influential article some years ago on Shakespeare's method in ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’, Kenneth Muir claimed it was the playwright's purpose to mock earlier Elizabethan writers who had treated the story awkwardly and clumsily.1 Muir saw Thomas Mouffet as Shakespeare's main quarry, but prominent among the other writers to whom he referred was Arthur Golding. Since Muir wrote, editors of A Midsummer Night's Dream, sceptical about Mouffet's part in the proceedings, have increasingly tended to read the burlesque as a parody of Golding's translation:2 R. A. Foakes in his New Cambridge edition, for example, is convinced that it is based on ‘the story as told in Golding’,3 and Harold Brooks, the Arden editor of the play, also has no doubt that ‘“Pyramus and Thisbe” is patently from Golding's version in his translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses.4

Yet there is reason for unease with this situation. Although constantly referred to incidentally by editors and critics, Shakespeare's use of Golding has never received specific attention and is itself somewhat problematic.5 Neither the extent nor the precise nature of the debt to the translator has ever been accurately gauged, a point emphasized recently by the case of Titus Andronicus.6 The background to Shakespeare's use of the translation is obscure, the circumstances in which he first read it continuing to be befogged in some quarters by the ‘myth’ that it was used in the Elizabethan grammar school.7 And the question of Shakespeare's attitude to Golding is a particular cause for concern.

Influential modern scholars see Golding's translation as a second-rate, stop-gap work which Shakespeare did not like but was forced to use because of his ‘small Latin’.8 T. W. Baldwin speaks of it, for example, as ‘a necessary evil in the background of Shakespeare’;9 Dover Wilson, alluding to Ezra Pound's eccentric proclamation of it as the most beautiful book in the language, is confident that if Pound ‘admires Golding's verse: I am very sure Shakespeare, a different kind of poet, did not’;10 and J. A. K. Thomson writes of Shakespeare's use of it in exasperation,

I ask this question: how could a man, who could read Ovid's Latin with ease and pleasure, bear to read Golding instead?11

But the Elizabethans took a very different view. Shakespeare's contemporaries used Golding whether they were able to read the original or not.12 As we now know, Spenser, Gabriel Harvey, Marlowe, George Peele, and others who were university men and whose general competence in Latin is beyond question, not only could ‘bear’ to read Golding but also, as the borrowings in their work show, found doing so an impressive experience.13

In fact, far from being a second-rate, stop-gap work, Golding's Ovid was highly regarded by the Elizabethans. Consider the excitement at the universities and Inns of Court at its first appearance. Published in partial form in 1565,14 it was immediately hailed at Cambridge as a ‘thoondrynge’ work,15 and such was the enthusiasm of one young student of Trinity College for this new translation of Ovid that he incorporated favourite moments from it into his translations of Seneca.16 It caused such a stir in London that before 1565 had drawn to a close a young member of the Middle Temple tried to steal some of Golding's glory by hurriedly and rather dishonestly publishing a heavily imitative translation of a fragment of Metamorphoses.17 And Golding continued to be popular reading with the young Elizabethan intelligentsia in the years that followed. In the seventies at Oxford when William Gager, the Latin dramatist, praised English translators in a poem to George Peele, only Golding was singled out by name;18 at Cambridge, the translation was being read by Gabriel Harvey, who was later to rate Golding among the ‘excellent and singular good Poets in this our age’;19 and it was almost certainly during his time at Pembroke Hall (1569-77) that Edmund Spenser, who is second only to Shakespeare in his use of the translation, first read the work.20 Nor was enthusiasm confined to young men at the universities and Inns of Court. Critics who took stock of the Elizabethan poetic scene had nothing but praise for the work. George Puttenham applauded Golding, praising the translator of Ovid for ‘very faithfully answering the authors intent’.21 And William Webbe, who was of the opinion that it ‘beautified’ the English language with its ‘majesty’ and ‘grace’, thought Golding's Ovid a work for which ‘our Country hath for many respects to gyve God thankes’.22

Whereas modern readers find the ungainliness and occasional coarseness of the work hard to digest, the Elizabethans delighted in it for its stirring dramatic character. Its dynamic imagery and graphic detail, vividly exemplified in the great set pieces of Ovid's poem such as the Phaethon story, Cadmus' fight with the Snake of Mars, Actaeon and Diana, the Hunt for the Calydonian Boar, reverberate through Elizabethan literature. At crucial moments in their work, the greatest Elizabethan writers reflect Golding's impact: in Book One of The Faerie Queene when the Redcrosse Knight succumbs in the Cave of Despair, Spenser recalls the abject terror of Golding's Achemenides before the Cyclops ‘trembling like an aspen leafe … sad and bloodlesse quyght’ (14.245), and how when ‘the cruell feend’ cried out for Ulysses and his ‘mates’ to be delivered into his hands so that as he devoured them, their ‘flesh might pant betweene’ his ‘jawes’, ‘before myne eyes then death the smallest sorrow stood’ (236);23 when Edward II curses Mortimer in ‘Killingworth castell’, Marlowe has in mind the moment when Jove strikes down Phaethon, ‘with fire he quencht fire’, and the boy falls to earth ‘blasing’ (2.414), and the memorable entry of Tisiphone ‘girded about … with wreathed Snakes’, sent from hell to inflict insanity upon Ino and Athamas,

There stoode the Fiend, and stopt their passage out,
And splaying forth hir filthie armes beknit with Snake about,
Did tosse and wave hir hatefull heade.

(4.606-8)24

And there is nothing other than the burlesque in Shakespeare's work that suggests that he did not share the general admiration for Golding. Debts to the translator in his work remind us that he was as impressed as his contemporaries by the dramatic character of the translation; he recalls, for example, moments such as the predicament of one ‘uppon the hatches’, who has been brought ‘too utter perill through fond toyes’ and ‘soothsayres prophecies’, fated to be cast into ‘the tumbling billowes’ below and ‘strangled in the gulf’ of the sea (11.648),25 or the ‘crack’ of the ‘sinews’ of an heroic figure enduring ‘labours’ imposed by a god who is purging his nature of its ‘earthly drosse’ before lifting him to ‘heaven’ (9.213),26 or the way a murderous boar, ‘the sturdie bristles on his backe … like a front of armed Pikes set close in battell ray’ (8.379-80), sinks ‘his tushes’ into the groin ‘(the speeding place of death)’, of one foolhardy enough to oppose him and ‘rippeth up his paunche’.27 Consider the response to Golding's dramatic feel for action in the debts to his favourite episode in the translation, the story of Phaethon. Among the first are allusions to the boy as ‘the wagoner … whirling’ about the globe and ‘reeling’ in the heavens in weariness as the reins slip from his grasp,28 and among the last, the moment when as the sun god ‘gathered up his steedes … that yit for feare did run / Like flaighted fiends’ after the death of his son, Golding has him seize the first solid object he can lay his hands on and ‘beate his whipstocke on their pates’ (2.501).29 And Shakespeare also went beyond his contemporaries in his appreciation of Golding. There is evidence on a small and large scale that he was much taken with the prospect of ‘Jove in a thatched house’ (As You Like It, 3.3.7-8), the way the translator transposes the world of Ovidian myth to the more humble and earthy surroundings of the English landscape. And his treatment of myth both in incidental references and in more significant features in his work reminds us that he had been deeply impressed by the Calvinistic translator's strong moral and spiritual vision of Ovid's poem.30

As for ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’, it seems to have been a favourite episode in Golding which Shakespeare found moving for its pathos and romance. In Lysander's proposal to Hermia, he recalled the lovers' ‘covenant’ that they ‘steale out of their father's house … to meete without the towne’ (4.106-8); for Juliet's passionate enquiry about her parents' grief over the dead Tybalt, he is indebted to the moving line when Thisbe discovers the dying boy,

And taking him betweene hir armes did wash his wounds with teares.

(169)

And he is thinking of it in the loveliest of all references to the lovers' story in his work when,

                                                                                                              In such a night
Did Thisbe fearfully o'ertrip the dew

(Merchant of Venice, 5.1.6-7)31

For Shakespeare to have paused in mid-career, therefore, to direct ridicule of ‘a rather scornful and mocking nature’32 at Golding's Ovid in ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ appears to be out of character. Evidence found in his work, outside the burlesque, indicates that he not only shared his age's general admiration for the work but was rather fond of the translator's version of the lovers' story. However, the idea of his ridiculing Golding in the burlesque is curiously in keeping with the irritation and impatience which has been felt by influential twentieth-century readers of the translation but of which there is no trace in the Elizabethan response to the work. It is also suspiciously in line with the climate of opinion generated by mistaken assumptions about Shakespeare's attitude to it. In these circumstances, it seems worthwhile re-examining the case for Golding's involvement in the burlesque.

II

It was Kenneth Muir who assembled the significant evidence.33 He saw this as Shakespeare's use of a number of words that are distinctive to Golding; ‘cranny’ for the fissure in the wall separating the lovers, Thisbe's ‘tarrying’ beneath the mulberry tree, the reference to the girl's upper garment as a ‘mantle’, the lovers' thanking the ‘courteous’ wall, and what he took to be a parody of Golding's style, the translator's habit of padding out his lines with the use of the auxiliary ‘did’.34

Others besides Muir35 have placed particular store on ‘cranny’ on the grounds that ‘No other version uses this word’.36 However, a source has been entirely overlooked which makes it extremely probable that every Elizabethan schoolboy would have had both the words Shakespeare uses for the gap in the wall separating Pyramus and Thisbe drilled into him: the dictionaries specifically designed for use in schools.37 In one of these, Richard Huloet's Abcedarium Anglico Latinum (London, 1552; revised edition 1572), for example, one finds rima, the word used in Ovid's text, defined as ‘Chinck, clyft, crany’ (italics mine);38 and the first English-Latin dictionary, Promptorium Parvulorum (London, 1449; five times reprinted), suggests that ‘cranny’ had long been the traditional translation of the word in English schools.39 The dictionaries show that schoolboys would have also been familiar with the notion of Thisbe ‘tarrying’ beneath the mulberry tree. Ovid says that when she is waiting for Pyramus, Thisbe ‘sub arbore sedit’ (Metamorphoses, 4.95),40 and in Cooper's Thesaurus, for example, we find sedere as ‘to tarie or abyde’;41 so, in the girl's circumstances, an Elizabethan would naturally translate Ovid's text at this point as Thisbe ‘tarries beneath the tree’.

As for Thisbe's ‘mantle’, there is clear textual evidence that this was taken not from Golding, but from a source which supplied Shakespeare with various other details as well as with part of the metre for the burlesque, the ballad on Pyramus and Thisbe by I. Thomson in A Handful of Pleasant Delightes. This is Thomson:

And as in haste she fled awaie,
Her Mantle fine:
The Lion tare in stead of praie.(42)

And here is the first reference to the garment in Shakespeare:

                                                            her mantle she did fall,
Which Lion vile with bloody mouth did stain.

(5.1.141-2, italics mine)

What shows Shakespeare is recalling Thomson and not Golding at this point is the reference to the ‘Lion’. There is no ‘lion’ in Ovid's (or Golding's) ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’. Ovid identifies the beast that frightens Thisbe as Lea or Leaena and Golding follows him, referring in his translation to a ‘Lionesse’. Thomson is unusual in referring to the beast as a ‘lion’.43 Shakespeare is also thinking of Thomson in the other reference to Thisbe's ‘mantle’ in Quince's Prologue:

Anon comes Pyramus, sweet youth and tall,
          And finds his trusty Thisbe's mantle slain;
Whereat with blade—with bloody, blameful blade—
          He bravely broached his boiling bloody breast

(5.1.143-6, italics mine)

Golding follows Ovid, referring to Pyramus' weapon as a ‘sword’ and locating the boy's self-inflicted wound in the stomach. But in Thomson, as in Shakespeare, one finds the weapon described as a ‘blade’ and the wound inflicted not in the stomach but higher on the boy's person, in the ‘hart’,

The Mantle this of Thisbie his,
          he desperately doth fare …
Then from his sheath he drew his blade,
          and to his hart
He thrust the point.

(p. 37, italics mine)

The lines in which Muir detects mockery of one of Golding's methods for padding out his fourteeners are in the Prologue, where Quince tells how the lion Thisbe:

          Did scare away, or rather did affright;
And as she fled, her mantle she did fall,
Which Lion vile with bloody mouth did stain.

(5.1.140-2, italics mine)44

This, allowing for the variations caused by Thomson's influence, is Shakespeare's translation of Ovid's text, which reads at the relevant point:

                                                                                                    timido pede fugit …
Dumque fugit; tergo velamina lapsa reliquit …
Ut Lea …
Ore cruentato tenues laniavit amictus.

(Metamorphoses, 4.99-104)

But compare a translation of the same lines in a very familiar Elizabethan work, Thomas Cooper's Thesaurus Linguae Romanae & Britannicae; in the Dictionarium Historicum & Poeticum, in an account of the lovers' story, one finds Thisbe, ‘in greate feare of a Lyonesse’,

for haste dyd lette fall hir upper garmente, which the
beaste dyd rente and teare in peeces.

(italics mine)

Elizabethans were generally fonder of the pleonastic ‘did’ than we are and, as Cooper reminds us, would be very liable to use it several times when faced by lines of Latin which contained, as these do, four verbs in the perfect tense. Shakespeare's lines are thus a slightly comic elaboration of a stock Elizabethan habit which arises because of Quince's verbose rhetoric. As for the more general notion that Shakespeare is satirizing Golding's metre, this is puzzling on the face of it, for none of the burlesque is written in Golding's long fourteener.45 However, the conviction that Golding is Shakespeare's target has produced the theory that his metre is present in ‘disguise’, although explanations of why Shakespeare should bother to go to such ingenious lengths have not been forthcoming. Thus Brooks, for example, argues that the extremely short rhyming couplet of the lovers' laments ‘is a variation, with internal rhyme [italics mine], of the fourteener used by Golding’,46 and R. A. Foakes, while allowing that Pyramus' lament is directly based on the metre in Thomson's poem on Pyramus and Thisbe, will not discount his involvement for ‘Golding's fourteen-syllable line breaks down into [italics mine] the measure of part’ of Thomson's poem.47

Close examination, therefore, leaves the impression that there is scarcely a trace of Golding in the burlesque.48 And collation of the text of the mechanicals' ‘play’ with that of the original confirms that Shakespeare's favourite translation of Metamorphoses had no part in his plans. Indeed, the confusion of Golding's translation with the burlesque has only served totally to obscure its most intriguing feature, which only becomes apparent once it is realized that ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ is, in fact, based on an incompetent reading of the Latin text. This is the root cause of much of the humour in the burlesque, as well as the only explanation for some of its more eccentric features.

III

To understand Shakespeare's real satirical purpose in the burlesque one needs to fix one's attention on the ‘author’ of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ within the context of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

It is Peter Quince the Carpenter who is the writer amongst the tradesmen, as Bottom reminds us when waking from his dream: ‘I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream’ (4.1.11-12), and the implication of the ‘company's’ discussions is that it is Quince who is the ‘author’ of the play. Hence Snug's enquiry to him, ‘Have you the lion's part written?’ (1.2.62), and the unquestioned assumption by the others that it is Quince who will rewrite and reshape the play where necessary: there are Bottom's instructions addressed to him, ‘Write me a prologue … tell them that I, Pyramus, am not Pyramus’ (3.1.16.19), and again, ‘you must name his name … and tell them plainly he is Snug the joiner’ (3.1.33, 41-2). It is Quince who immediately decides on the metre for the prologue, although apparently later changing his mind; and despite giving them written parts as Pyramus' father and Thisbe's mother, it is Quince who presumably rapidly rewrites the play and recasts Snout and Starveling because of his concern that ‘Wall’ and ‘Moonshine’ be represented.

A pointer to Quince's method in composing ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ is the Latinate reference to Pyramus as a ‘juvenal’ (3.1.89)49 and the joke on the ‘cranny’ which is ‘right and sinister’ (5.1.162, italics mine). It is evident that he has some Latin and is rather proud of the fact, which probably explains why he has gone directly to Ovid's text for his source. At times, he recalls it word for word, as in ‘And as she fled, her mantle she did fall’ (5.1.141) (‘Dumque fugit … velamina lapsa reliquit’, Metamorphoses, 4.101), and his play is strewn with phrases and words taken directly from the Latin. Some examples are the lovers' agreement ‘To meet at Ninus' tomb’ (5.1.137) (‘Conveniant ad busta Nini’, 4.88), Thisbe's ‘mantle … stained with blood’ (5.1.278) (‘tinctam sanguine’, 4.107),50 the lion tearing it ‘with bloody mouth’ (5.1.142) (‘cruentato ore’, 4.104),51 and the lovers ‘making moan’ (5.1.329) (‘questi’, 4.84).52

However, his confidence in going back to the original is misplaced; his Latin is so poor that he repeatedly stumbles over the most elementary words and phrases. There is, for example, that small, problematic feature of A Midsummer Night's Dream, the perplexing description of Pyramus as ‘most lovely Jew’ (3.1.89, italics mine); the suggestion that has been made from time to time—that this should be read as ‘most lovely Juv53—should be accepted by editors of the play for it is, in fact, a strained attempt to translate the phrase Ovid uses to introduce the boy, ‘iuvenum pulcherrimus’ (4.55, italics mine), ‘the most lovely of young men’.54 There is also the unforgettable moment when his hero, in a magnanimous mood, declares,

Sweet moon, I thank thee for thy sunny beams.

(5.1.67, italics mine)

In Ovid's text Quince had found ‘lunae radios’ (iv.99), ‘the rays of the moon’, but the phrase presented him with a problem because he knew radius only by the stock definition he found in dictionaries like Cooper's Thesaurus, as ‘A beame of the sunne’. He therefore has settled for what seems to him a sensible compromise and, in the process, afforded audiences amusement ever since. And then there is his biggest gaffe of all. He mistranslates the word Ovid uses in his initial reference to the story of the lovers. Ovid introduces it in Metamorphoses as a ‘fable’ not commonly known (‘vulgaris fabula non est’, Metamorphoses, 4.53). For the Elizabethans, fabula had two meanings. It meant ‘a tale’, but, as Cooper's Thesaurus tells us, it could also mean ‘an interlude or a comedie’; and somehow Quince arrives at the secondary meaning of fabula. Hence his constant reference to his dramatization of the lovers' story as an ‘interlude’ (1.2.5 and 5.1.154) and as a ‘comedie’, despite its obviously tragic content, as in its title, ‘The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe’ (1.2.11-12, italics mine), is an attempt in his own muddled way to be true to what he thinks he has found in Ovid's text.

Indeed, his understanding of the Latin text is strained and confused throughout. Although he refers to Pyramus as a ‘sweet youth’ (5.1.143), ‘young’ (5.1.56), and a ‘juvenal’, he has no real grasp of one of the central features of the story, the extreme youth of the lovers; in Ovid, they are little more than children. He raises no objection to Bottom's ludicrous suggestion that he play Pyramus in a beard, and also refers to Pyramus as a ‘man’ (5.1.128), a ‘gentlemanlike man’ (1.2.81), and, in his play, as a ‘poor knight’ (5.1.72). Thisbe similarly is a ‘lady’ (5.1.129) and ‘the fairest dame’ (288), possibly a mistranslation of ‘praelata puellis’, ‘the loveliest of girls’. His instruction to Flute that Thisbe's part must be played ‘in a mask’ (1.2.45) is also the result of his misreading the Latin.55 In the play itself, he muddles details, transferring them from one lover to the other with unintentionally hilarious results. For example, in Pyramus' celebrated apostrophe ad leones, the detail of the lions ‘devouring’ the boy (‘consumite viscera’, 4.113), which is part of his despairing request to them when he thinks Thisbe dead, is transferred to the girl in the equally impassioned address to the beasts by the hero of the ‘play’ (5.1.286ff) and, either through Quince's occasionally unhappy way with words or through a particularly infelicitous slip of the tongue on Nick Bottom's part, becomes the grossly unnatural, ‘Since lion vile hath here deflowered my dear’ (5.1.287, italics mine). In addition, the exact manner of Thisbe's death, by the sword after it has been placed carefully to the heart (‘aptato pectus mucrone sub imum’, 4.162), is transferred to Pyramus who actually dies of a stomach wound in Ovid, yet ‘pectus’ is still translated when applied to the boy as if it referred to a woman's breast. Hence the swordthrust into the gallant hero's ‘left pap’ (5.1.293, italics mine).56

Peter Quince is bedevilled by other afflictions. He is liable to stumble over his English: ‘Thisbe's mantle slain’ (5.1.144), kissing ‘the wall's hole’ (5.1.200); his cultural references go hopelessly astray: linking ‘Lemander’ and ‘Helen’ (5.1.195-6), ‘Shafalus and Procris’ (5.1.197); and he is constantly at odds with poetic decorum. But it is his running battle with the Latin text of Ovid's original that is at the root of most of the unintentional and hilarious humour of his ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’.

IV

In A Midsummer Night's Dream, therefore, one finds among the tradesmen, that ‘crew of patches’ who have brought their ‘company’ to court to entertain the nobility, a playwright with small Latin. The quiet and conscientious Peter Quince has always seemed peripheral, overshadowed by his irrepressible leading man, but if one turns one's attention to this retiring figure one will see that his other features are not without significance. One notes, for example, that he is both playwright and player taking a supporting role in his own work. And, together with its leading actor, he is one of the leaders of the company, involved in its management; he assigns parts, deals diplomatically with egotistical leading men, discusses suggestions for re-writing and costume, draws up the ‘bill of properties’ (1.2.97-8), and arranges rehearsals and the location of the ‘tiring-house’ (3.1.4). (It is very noticeable that, besides being literate in an age when the majority of his class could not sign their names, Peter Quince is also surprisingly knowledgeable about theatrical detail and requirements.) In addition, when it comes to the matter of his writing, this hempen homespun is notable for his facility; he works under pressure and, whatever the dubious quality of his work may be, he works quickly, producing rapid and quite extensive rewrites at short notice. Moreover, as his play vividly illustrates, he has a weakness for romantic and tragic verse, and a fondness for Ovid.

Among another ‘crew of patches’ who often took their company to court to entertain the nobility on festive occasions, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, there was also, of course, a playwright with ‘small Latin’, Shakespeare himself. And if one allows for the exaggerated dimensions and mockery of his picture, Peter Quince bears a quite striking resemblance to his creator. Shakespeare, for instance, was unique among Elizabethan playwrights in both writing and performing in his own plays, taking, like Peter Quince, a supporting role. His versatility is alluded to in the first known reference to him by a contemporary, Robert Greene's scorn of him in 1592 as ‘an absolute Johannes Factotum’. A few years later, and before A Midsummer Night's Dream was written, his influence and activities had increased still more; he had become both a shareholder (a ‘housekeeper’) and, along with Kempe and Burbage, one of the leaders of his company. Moreover, as far as his writing was concerned, like Quince, Shakespeare had remarkable facility; as well as Ben Jonson's reference to this, Heminges and Condell noted in the First Folio that ‘His mind and hand went together, and what he thought he uttered with that easiness that we have scarse received from him a blot in his papers’.57 His taste for romantic and tragic verse had been made apparent by this date in Venus and Adonis, and, significantly, elements of self-mockery have been detected in the parody of the poem in the burlesque.58 His fondness for Ovid was, of course, well known; it occasioned Francis Meres' tribute that ‘the soule’ of the Latin poet lives on in ‘mellifluous & honey-tongued Shakespeare’. Which takes one back to his ‘small Latin’.

In stories which have come down to us such as that of the ‘Lattin Spoones’, it seems that his limited Latin was something of a joke between Shakespeare and his friends.59 The climate created by mistaken assumptions about his attitude to the translation, combined with apparent resemblances to the translator's version of the lovers' story has led to the burlesque's being misread as a satiric attack on Golding. But it is Shakespeare himself with his ‘small Latin’ who is the central target for its mockery. By creating his humble alter ego in Peter Quince and installing him at the heart of the ‘company’ of the ‘rude mechanicals’ to provide a stuttering and hilarious treatment of the Latin source of their ‘play’, the great poet, who could refer to himself elsewhere as ‘dumb’ (Sonnet 83, line 10), ‘unletter'd’ (Sonnet 85, line 6), and as one who made himself‘a motley to the view’ (Sonnet 110, line 2), and sold ‘cheap what is most dear’ (Sonnet 110, line 3), has contrived to send up his ‘fault’60 gloriously by his own hand.

Notes

  1. ‘Pyramus and Thisbe: A Study in Shakespeare's Method’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 5 (1954), 141-53.

  2. In ‘Pyramus and Thisbe: Shakespeare's Debt to Moffet Cancelled’, Review of English Studies, ns 32 (1981), 296-301, Katherine Duncan-Jones convincingly argues that Mouffet is not involved at all.

  3. Cambridge, 1984, p. 10.

  4. London, 1979; reprinted with corrections, 1983, p. lix.

  5. There have been no studies of Shakespeare's use of Golding, only incidental examinations in discussions of his general use of Ovid such as that by T. W. Baldwin, Shakspere's Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, 2 vols. (Urbana, Illinois, 1950), vol. 2, pp. 417-55, J. A. K. Thomson, Shakespeare and the Classics (London, 1952), pp. 35ff., and J. Dover Wilson, ‘Shakespeare's “Small Latin”—How Much?’, Shakespeare Survey 10 (1957), 12-26.

    There have been only two brief studies of Golding's translation per se: ‘Golding's Ovid’, by Gordon Braden, in The Classics and English Renaissance Poetry: Three Case Studies (New Haven, 1978), pp. 1-52, and the Introduction to Ovid's Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation 1567 (New York, 1965), by the volume's editor, J. F. Nims, pp. xiii-xxxv. Quotation from Golding is from The xv. Bookes of P. Ovidius Naso, entytuled Metamorphosis (London, 1567), ed. W. H. D. Rouse (London, 1904, reprinted London, 1961).

  6. It has always been assumed that Titus contained no debt to Golding. But evidence has now come to light that Shakespeare used the translation for the story from Ovid's poem that was one of his main sources, that he took from it the play's dominant image of the tiger, that he echoed it consistently in incidental references to myth, and that Golding is a significant influence on the concept of metamorphosis which is at the heart of the play. (See my ‘Golding's Translation of Metamorphoses as Source for Titus Andronicus', Notes and Queries, 233 (1988), 449-51; ‘Golding's Metamorphoses and Titus Andronicus’, Notes and Queries, 223 (1978), 117-20; ‘Shakespeare, Studley, and Golding’, Review of English Studies, 39 (1988), 522-7; and my forthcoming book, Shakespeare's Ovid and Arthur Golding.)

  7. Nims, the only editor of Golding's translation in recent times, states in his Introduction that ‘Shakespeare quite possibly used Golding in the Stratford school along with the Latin’ (p. xx). In ‘Ovid in the Sixteenth Century’ (Ovid, ed. J. W. Binns (London, 1973), pp. 210-42), Caroline Jameson also states that, in view of the fact that ‘the use of translations, especially versified ones was not frowned on for school use … it is quite possible that major translations such as Golding's, Turbervile's and Churchyard's became interwoven with the original in the pupil's mind’ (p. 213), and later that ‘if translations such as Golding's were used as an aid to study, it would be most likely that Shakespeare used, and remembered, Golding and Ovid together as a composite source’ (p. 217).

    Such an hypothesis throws up anomalies large and small. There is the heavy use of Golding by Elizabethan writers who were too old to have possibly used him in school, such as George Gascoigne, Barnabe Riche, Lodowicke Loyd, and, above all, Edmund Spenser. If Golding was used in grammar schools, then Phaer's Aeneid would have most certainly also been used, forming with the original, like Golding and Ovid's poem, another ‘composite source’ in any pupil's mind. Yet writers like Shakespeare and Marlowe, who knew Golding well, give no sign of having known Phaer when using heavily Vergilian material.

    Assumptions about the possible use of Golding's Ovid, which its expansive, paraphrastic nature makes totally unsuitable for the close work required in the grammar-school classroom, are based on a single recommendation in a work written in 1622 by John Brinsley, A Consolation for Our Grammar Schooles (p. 64).

    However, Brinsley himself shows in an earlier work, Ludus Literarius, that the use of translations such as Golding's was regarded as bad practice; they were not allowed into their schools by the ‘best and wisest’ teachers (p. 115), were not used by average teachers who are represented in this work by Spoudaeus (p. 91), and were widely regarded as unsuitable for use in school (pp. 115-16). (In A Consolation for Our Grammar Schooles, he remarks that they were ‘generally in disgrace’ in schools (p. 45).) He recommends them only as part of an advanced stage of a careful system built upon his ‘grammaticall translations’, which were nicely geared to the needs of the pupils (see, for example, Ludus Literarius, pp. 89-125).

    Quotations are from Ludus Literarius: or, The Grammar Schoole (1612), ed. E. T. Campagnac (London, 1917), and from A Consolation for Our Grammar Schooles (1622), reprinted in The English Experience, vol. 203 (New York, 1969).

  8. From Ben Jonson's ‘To the memory of my beloved’, first printed among the preliminaries of the Shakespeare First Folio; it appears in the Complete Oxford Shakespeare among the ‘Commendatory Poems and Prefaces (1599-1640)’, p. xliii, line 31.

  9. T. W. Baldwin, review of Ovid's Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation 1567, ed. J. F. Nims (New York, 1965), Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 66 (1967), 125.

  10. Dover Wilson, ‘Shakespeare's “Small Latin”—How Much?’, p. 18.

  11. Thomson, Shakespeare and the Classics, p. 154.

  12. We know, of course, that Shakespeare used Latin texts, but that like other Elizabethan writers, such as Marlowe and Spenser, he also used contemporary translations; for Metamorphoses, for instance, he used the original or Golding or, upon occasion, the partial translation of Ovid's poem by Abraham Fraunce in Amintas Dale (London, 1592; stc 11341). In his case, however, a comparative lack of facility in reading Latin probably accentuated the use of a favoured translation like Golding.

    For examples of Shakespeare's use of Fraunce, see ‘O brave new world: Abraham Fraunce and The Tempest’, English Language Notes, 23 (1986), 18-24, and ‘Two Notes on Shakespeare and the Translators’, Review of English Studies, ns 38 (1987), 523-6.

  13. For Spenser, see my ‘Spenser and Golding’, Notes and Queries, 230 (1985), 18-21; ‘Spenser and Golding: Further Debts in The Faerie Queene’, Notes and Queries, 231 (1986), 342-4; ‘Debts to Golding in Spenser's Minor Poems’, Notes and Queries, 231 (1986), 345-7; and ‘The Faerie Queene Bk 1 and Golding's Translation of Metamorphoses’, Notes and Queries, 232 (1987), 197-9; for Gabriel Harvey, see my ‘When Did Spenser Read Golding?’, Notes and Queries, 233 (1988), 38-40; for Marlowe, see M. M. Wills, ‘Marlowe's Role in Borrowed Lines’, PMLA, 52 (1937), 902-5, and my ‘Notes on Marlowe and Golding’, Notes and Queries, 232 (1987), 191-3; and for Peele, my ‘George Peele and Golding's Metamorphoses’, Notes and Queries, 214 (1969), 286-7, and ‘Arthur Golding and George Peele's Polyhymnia’, Notes and Queries, 230 (1985), 17-18.

  14. The first four books of Golding's translation were published in 1565, the full version in 1567.

  15. T. B. (Thomas Blundeville?), in commendatory verses to John Studley's translation of Seneca's Agamemnon (London, 1566).

  16. See my ‘Echoes of Golding's Ovid in John Studley's Translations of Seneca’, Notes and Queries, 232 (1987), 185-8.

  17. See my ‘Thomas Peend and Arthur Golding’, Notes and Queries, 214 (1969), 18-19.

  18. For Gager's tribute, see my ‘Arthur Golding and George Peele's Polyhymnia’.

  19. Harvey quotes Golding in a poem he wrote in November 1573; for details of this, of other debts to Golding in Harvey's works, and his high opinion of the translator, see my ‘When did Spenser read Golding?’

  20. See my ‘When did Spenser read Golding?’

  21. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (London, 1589); reprinted in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1904), vol. 2, pp. 1-193; p. 65.

  22. William Webbe, ‘A Discourse of English Poetrie’ (London, 1586); reprinted in Elizabethan Critical Essays, vol. 1, pp. 226-302; pp. 257, 256, 243.

  23. Compare the Redcrosse Knight's reaction to the sight of ‘damned ghosts that doe in tomrents waile’,

    The sight whereof so throughly him dismaid,
    That nought but death before his eies he saw

    (1.9.1-2)

    and, when Despair gives him the dagger to end his life,

                                                                                                                            his hand did quake
    And tremble like a leafe of Aspin greene,
    And troubled blood through his pale face was seene
    To come and goe.

    (i.51.3-6)

    (Quotation is from The Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. R. Morris (London, 1902).)

  24. Compare:

                        if proud Mortimer do weare this crowne,
    Heavens turne it to a blaze of quenchlesse fire
    Or like the snakie wreathe of Tisiphon,
    Engirt the temples of his hateful head.

    (Edward II, lines 2031-4)

    (Quotation is from The Works of Christopher Marlowe, ed. C. F. Tucker Brooke (Oxford, 1910; reprinted 1962).)

  25. Compare Clarence, who is put in mortal danger by ‘prophecy’ and ‘suchlike toys’ (1.1.39, 60), and in his dream is walking ‘Upon … the hatches’, when ‘Struck … overboard / Into the tumbling billows of the main’ and ‘smothered … in the envious flood’ (Richard III, 1.4.17-20, 40, 37).

  26. Compare Ferdinand, ‘I had rather crack my sinews’ (Tempest, 3.1.26), when he is about the ‘labours’ set by Prospero in the log-bearing scene and what is ‘dead’ in him is quickened (3.1.6-7).

  27. Compare the description of the boar who will give the imprudent Adonis his death wound by sheathing his ‘tusk in his soft groin’:

    On his bow-back he hath a battle set
    Of bristly pikes that ever threat his foes.

    (Venus, 1116, 619-20)

  28. Compare:

    And then I'll come and be thy wagoner,
    And whirl along with thee about the globe

    (Titus, 5.2.48-9)

    and Sonnet 7, lines 9-10: ‘when from highmost pitch, with weary car’ … ‘he reeleth’. (For further details of these particular debts to Golding's Phaethon episode, see my ‘Shakespeare, Studley, and Golding’.)

  29. Compare Valerius' warning of the King's anger to Palamon and Arcite:

                                                                                                                            yet be leaden-footed
    Till his great rage be off him. Phoebus, when
    He broke his whipstock and exclaimed against
    The horses of the sun, but whispered to
    The loudness of his fury.

    (The Two Noble Kinsmen, 1.2.84-8)

  30. For further discussion of both these points, see my forthcoming Shakespeare's Ovid and Arthur Golding.

  31. Compare:

    Steal forth thy father's house tomorrow night,
    And in the wood, a league without the town,
    Where I did meet thee once …
    There will I stay for thee.

    (A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1.1.164-6, 168)

    and

    Wash they his wounds with tears; mine shall be
              spent
    When theirs are dry.

    (Romeo and Juliet, 3.2.130-1)

    In Golding Thisbe meets with Pyramus as soon as ‘the deawie grasse had dride’ (4.102).

  32. Caroline Jameson, ‘Ovid in the Sixteenth Century’, p. 217.

  33. Since Muir wrote (1954), the assumption that the burlesque is a parody of the translator has led to the production of some rather dubious evidence by editors and critics who forget about Ovid in their preoccupation with Golding. R. A. Foakes, for instance, cites not only ‘the general alignment of the “tedious brief scene” of Pyramus and Thisbe with the story as told in Golding’ but also ‘the correspondence of a number of details which are different in other versions, such as the mantle dropped by Thisbe (5.1.141; iv.125); the “crannied hole” (5.i.156; iv.83); “Ninus' tomb” (5.i.137; iv.108); and the mulberry tree (5.i.147; iv.110)’ (Foakes, Dream, p. 10). But Shakespeare would have surely known the story line from his schoolboy study of Ovid and also that the lovers meet at ‘Ninus tomb’ (‘ad busta Nini’, Metamorphoses, 4.88) under ‘the mulberry tree’ (‘Arbor … morus’, 89-90); in addition, ‘crannied hole’ is not an expression used in Golding, and, as Muir points out, Thisbe wears a ‘mantle’ in Thomson's ballad on Pyramus and Thisbe.

  34. Muir, ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’, pp. 143-4.

  35. See, for example, Brooks, Dream, p. lix.

  36. Muir, ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’, p. 143.

  37. John Brinsley speaks of these as ‘the Dictionaries, which they ought to have ever at hand’ (Ludus Literarius: or, The Grammar Schoole (London, 1612), ed. E. T. Campagnac (London, 1917), p. 123). In addition, there would be a large dictionary such as Cooper's available to them, kept permanently in the school, chained to some convenient point in the schoolroom.

  38. Reference is to a copy of the 1575 edition of Huloet. There were two editions of Huloet's dictionary (1552 and 1575). In Shakspere's Small Latine, vol. 1, p. 715, Baldwin discusses Shakespeare's possible use of Huloet.

  39. This was produced in the fifteenth century but continued to be used in the sixteenth. For ‘crany’, see the Early English Text society edition by A. L. Mayhew (London, 1908), p. 100.

    The use of ‘chink’ was also well established; see, for example, Peter Levins, Manipulus Vocabulorum (London, 1570), ed. H. B. Wheatley, Camden Society (London, 1867), p. 138.

  40. Quotations are from a Regius edition, Metamorphoseos (Lyon, 1518), ed. Stephen Orgel (New York, 1976).

  41. Thomas Cooper, Thesaurus Linguae Romanæ & Britannicæ (London, 1565).

  42. A Handful of Pleasant Delights (London, 1584; stc 21105), ed. Clement Robinson (Manchester, 1871), p. 36 (italics mine).

  43. A lioness appears, for example, in the account of the lovers' story in Cooper's Thesaurus which is discussed below. And it was the traditional identification of the beast: Chaucer, for example, refers to ‘a wyld lyonesse’ in The Legend of Thisbe (805), and in Sandys's translation (1626), one finds ‘a Lyonesse, smear'd with blood’.

  44. He cites these lines from the translation of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’, but they are rather exceptional:

    This neighbrod bred acquaintance first, this
              neighbrod first did stirre
    The secret sparkes, this neighbrod first an entrance
              in did showe,
    For love to come to that which afterward did
              growe.

    (4.74-6, italics mine)

  45. When the prologue is proposed, Quince does say, ‘it shall be written in eight and six’, but this proves of little significance; it is immediately contradicted by Bottom, ‘let it be written in eight and eight’ (3.1.18-20), and when it does appear, it is in iambic pentameter.

  46. Dream, p. lxxxvii.

  47. Dream, p. 11.

    Compare the metre of the lovers' lament,
                                  Thy mantle good,
                                  What, stained with blood?
                        Approach, ye Furies fell.
                                  O Fates, come, come,
                                  Cut thread and thrum,
                        Quail, crush, conclude, and quell.

    (5.1.277-82)

    with that of Golding,

    And as she knew right well the place and faction of
              the tree
    (As whych she saw so late before:) even so when
              she did see
    The colour of the Berries turnde, shee was
              uncertain whither
    It were the tree at which they both agreed to meete
              togither.

    (4.157-60)

  48. Golding's involvement is limited to a single word, ‘Thanks, courteous wall’ (5.1.176, italics mine), which echoes ‘we think ourselves in debt / For this same piece of courtesy’ (4.96, italics mine).

  49. The Oxford editors, who follow q in their original-spelling text and print ‘Iuuenall’ (line 876), modernize this to ‘juvenile’ in their modern-spelling text, commenting in the Textual Companion to the edition that ‘The -al spelling is early (twice in Shakespeare and once in 1607), superseded by the -ile alternative (1625+). Here there seems no reason not to modernize’ (p. 282). I believe that the more widely adopted Latinate ‘juvenal’ is the preferable modern-spelling form, for it does not so obscure what I believe and here argue to be Quince's struggle with Latin.

  50. Golding does not refer to blood ‘staining’ the garment at all; ‘vestem quoque sanguine tinctam’, for example, appears in his translation as ‘the bloudie cloke’ (4.132). (For ‘tinctus’ as ‘stained’, see Cooper, Thesaurus Linguae.)

  51. Golding has the more dramatic phrase, ‘with bloudie teeth’ (129). Muir, ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’, described ‘with bloody mouth’ as a debt to Chaucer and has recently been followed by Anne Thompson in Shakespeare's Chaucer (Liverpool, 1978), p. 93. But Chaucer, like Shakespeare, took the phrase from the Latin.

    Chaucer is not involved in the burlesque; the other ‘debt’ Muir refers to, the ‘wicked wall’, is taken, as textual evidence shows, from ‘The History of Pyramus and Thisbe’, the anonymous poem in A Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions (London, 1578). For detailed discussion of this and E. Talbot Donaldson's recent claim that Sir Thopas is a source for the burlesque (The Swan at the Well: Shakespeare Reading Chaucer (New Haven, 1985), pp. 5-20), see my ‘Chaucer's Non-Involvement in “Pyramus and Thisbe” in A Midsummer Night's Dream’, scheduled for publication in Notes and Queries, Sept. 1989.

  52. ‘To make moan’ is the meaning given for queror.questus in Cooper's Thesaurus Linguae. (Golding at this point has ‘after much complaint’ (4.104).) In addition to the other terms taken from the Latin, it is a probability that the expression, ‘poor soules’ (5.1.132), although referring to both lovers, was suggested by ‘anima … miseranda’ (4.110) in Ovid's text; in Sandys at the relevant point, for instance, one finds ‘'twas I (poore soule) that slew thee’, and Mouffet also describes Thisbe as ‘poor soul’.

  53. See, for example, R. A. Foakes's footnote to 3.1.77 in his edition of Dream.

  54. The epithet Ovid uses to introduce Pyramus (pulcherrimus) also accounts for his being referred to as ‘most lovely’ earlier (1.2.69). (Golding does not translate pulcherrimus as a superlative.)

  55. Thisbe is not masked throughout Ovid's story, as Quince suggests; he is confused by the fact that during the course of the story, when she leaves her father's house to meet Pyramus at Ninus' tomb, wishing to conceal her identity, she has her face covered: ‘adopertaque vultum’ (4.94). (In Sandys's translation at this point, one finds Thisbe coming ‘maskt to Ninus tomb’; Golding has ‘muffling hir with clothes about hir chin’ (116).)

  56. The anonymous writer of ‘The History of Pyramus and Thisbe’ provides an interesting parallel. At the relevant moment in his poem, he, too, has the line from the Latin text in mind, and, echoing Ovid's phrase, ‘pectus … sub imum’, he describes the death of Thisbe as, ‘Wherewith beneath her pap (alas) into her brest shee strake’: The Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions (London, 1578), ed. D. E. L. Crane (Menston, Yorkshire, 1972), p. iiv (italics mine).

  57. John Heminges and Henry Condell, ‘To the Great Variety of Readers’, first printed among the preliminaries of the Shakespeare First Folio; it appears in the Complete Oxford Shakespeare among the ‘Commendatory Poems and Prefaces (1599-1640)’, p. xliii, lines 33-6.

  58. See Walter Staton Jr, ‘Ovidian Elements in A Midsummer Night's Dream’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 26 (1962-3), 177, and my forthcoming ‘Chaucer's Non-Involvement in Pyramus and Thisbe’.

  59. For this particular story, see S. Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (Oxford, 1975), p. 207.

  60. But it is noticeable that even while mocking this ‘fault’ in himself in the burlesque, he not only handles the Latin text but also knowingly mishandles it, which suggests a degree of competence and confidence on his part. Nevertheless, as he shows quite delightfully here, he was self-conscious about his Latin, moving as he did among acquaintances who, if they had been at university, would be much more competent in the language; but the truth of the matter seems to lie with what was reported to Aubrey by William Beeston, whose father had belonged to the Lord Chamberlain's men and worked with Shakespeare: ‘Though as Ben: Johnson sayes of him, that he had but little Latine and lesse Greeke, He understood Latine pretty well’ (Schoenbaum, Documentary Life, p. 88).

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