[In the following excerpt, Grose discusses Sandys's commentary to his 1632 translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, contending that it was influenced by Francis Bacon.]

They will repeale the goodly exil'd traine
Of gods and goddesses, which in thy just raigne
Were banish'd nobler Poems, now, with these
The silenc'd tales o'th' Metamorphoses
Shall stuffe their lines, and swell the windy Page,
Till Verse refin'd by thee, in this last Age,
Turne ballad rime. …

Thomas Carew, “An Elegie on the death of the Deane of Pauls, Dr. John Donne” (1633)

Thus does Thomas Carew seem to predict the course of English verse subsequent to the death of John Donne in 1631. As the elegist was well aware, the Ovidian gods and goddesses had already been wandering in English libraries for at least a decade; rather than prophesying, he testifies to the firmly reestablished popularity of Ovid's Metamorphoses. And Carew may have been commenting specifically on the success of the most recent and elaborately presented of the English Ovids, the Metamorphosis of George Sandys (1578-1644), the author most responsible for the renewed vogue of the banished poet. A late-Elizabethan student at Oxford and the Inns of Court, Sandys became an important Jacobean voyager to the Middle East and in the 1630s a member of Falkland's center of Anglican culture at Great Tew. He was perhaps best known in his own time as an accomplished traveler, scholar, poet, and (to a lesser extent) as colonial administrator in the Virginia settlement during the tempestuous days of the colony's second charter. Literary historians have recognized Sandys as an important contributor to the art of the neoclassical couplet; he was remembered in 1699 by Dryden as “the ingenious and learned Sandys, the best versifier of the former age.”¹ But his full legacy includes detailed records of the Jamestown massacre of 1622 as well as the first major literary work produced in the New World, the 1632 Ovid's Metamorphosis, English'd, Mythologiz'd and Represented in Figures. …

The earliest fragments of Sandys's translation of Ovid had found their way into his A Relation of A Journey begun An: Dom: 1610 (1615), one of the fullest and most interesting of the period's cultivated travel-narratives. The Ovid itself appeared piecemeal. Its first five books were published in 1621, as was the second printing of the popular Relation; the Ovid had been registered with the Stationers on 27 April, the very month in which Sandys was appointed Resident Treasurer of the Virginia Colony. With the encouragement of Michael Drayton (among others), Sandys completed his translation of the remaining books in Virginia. We are told that he finished two of them “amongst the roreing of the seas, the rustling of the Shrowds, and Clamour of Saylers.”² The book was thus, in his words, “a double Stranger: Sprung from the Stocke of the ancient Romanes; but bred in the New-World.”³ The entire translation was published in 1626, with a dedication to King Charles. And in 1632, a year before Carew's elegy on Donne was published, there appeared the luxurious folio which Sandys called the “second edition, carefully revised,” incorporating for the first time a voluminous commentary on the fables, together with an “Essay to the translation of Virgil's Aeneis.” Sandys's translation made Ovid's tales available in a metrical version for the first time since Arthur Golding's translation of 1567; and it was the first appearance of the Metamorphoses in any form since the school translation of John Brinsley (1618). The commentary, which takes up somewhat more than half the volume, was the first of its kind in English since Abraham Fraunce's The Third Part of the Countess of Pembroke's Ivy Church (1592), and it brought the allegorical exegesis of Ovid to a point beyond which it did not and perhaps could not progress. In the Relation of 1615, Sandys had already provided important source material for writers as diverse as Bacon, Browne, Burton, Cowley, Fuller, Jonson, and Milton. Similarly, the commentary of 1632, less a reference work than a grand culmination to Renaissance Ovidian mythography, influenced educators, scholars, and poets in England from Milton to Leigh Hunt and Keats, and is chiefly responsible for the book's well-deserved reputation as “the greatest repository of allegorized myth in English.”⁴

Readers of 1626 (the first complete translation) were provided with a four-page glossary of the chief mythological names mentioned by Ovid; and an eight-page “Table to the commentary,” including such topics of popular interest as “Witches,” “Serpents,” and the like, accompanied the “Fourth edition” of 1640. No such apparatus permits the selective or systematic exploration of either the 1632 edition or its two modern descendants, despite its enormous range and density of allusion. Among the twenty-six “principall Authors” listed at the end of Book I, we find Plato (“the poeticall Philosopher”), Strabo, Plutarch, Lucian, Cicero, Pliny, Macrobius, Comes, and Scaliger. But the full list of citations includes nearly two hundred writers, “almost of all Ages and Arguments.”⁵ About half of these are classical writers in Greek and Latin. There are also biblical prophets, Renaissance poets and scholars (including previous editors of Ovid such as Pontanus and Regius), medieval and Renaissance theologians, historians, scientists as recent as Tycho Brahe and Galileo, and travelers from classical to contemporary times. Bodin and the Scottish exile Bothwell are cited as authorities on witchcraft, Ulrichus Schmidel on Amazons living along the Orellana River; and as a European instance of technological ingenuity (a trait Sandys finds especially common among the old Egyptians), there is one Cornelius Dribles, an inventor who plays the virginal “without touching of a key, by the cooperating rayes of the Sun”⁶ There are informed and interesting comments on folk customs in the Old World and the New, geography and archeology, agriculture and commerce, legal and ecclesiastical matters. Sandys's own extensive travels provide the most up-to-date glosses, of course, from remarks based on his early visit to the Egyptian pyramids to his speculations on infant sacrifice among the native tribes of Florida or the colonists' name for the summer frogs of Virginia, “called Pohatans hounds by the English, of their continuall yelping.”⁷ And the commentary provides the occasion for hundreds of additional translations, from classical and later authors.

The resulting “mythology” is an important testimony to the influence of Francis Bacon, whom Sandys calls the “crowne” of the modern writers on the fables;⁸ When Sandys began his work, Bacon's De Sapientia Veterum of 1609 had just appeared in translation as The Wisdom of the Ancients (1619). Henry Reynolds's Mythomystes, published like Sandys's expanded and revised Ovid in 1632, also calls for the sort of thing to be found in Sandys's commentary: a poetry and criticism based on the assumption that “Ethnic” hieroglyphs, fables, and philosophy expressed enduring truths, truths largely reaffirmed (as Sandys believed) in the findings of the latest scholarship, scientific inquiry, or the reports of travelers to “Ginny” or “Inde.” Sandys's own explanation of his purposes may help to account for the impression that, among his army of authorities, we are rehearsing the entire history of mythographic interpretation, from Euhemerus and the Alexandrian exegetes to Natales Comes, and in England from Golding and Abraham Fraunce to Bacon (of these Sandys mentions only Comes and Bacon). As he indicates at the outset of his preface, Sandys proposes to “collect out of sundrie Authors the Philosophicall sense of these fables of Ovid.”⁹

Moreover, he has “given a touch of the relation which those fabulous Traditions have to the divine History,” for the purpose of affirming Ovid's special place in the history of human culture.¹⁰ As Sandys tells the story, the period of antiquity could be divided into the “Obscure” or “emptie” times (from the Creation to the Flood in divine and “Ethnick” history alike) and the “Heroycall” or “Fabulous” period; at this later time flourished the “after deified Heroes … as also the Fabulous.”¹¹ Writing when he did, at the juncture of “Ethnick” and Christian eras, Ovid was thus uniquely situated to bring to a culmination the era of “poetic tradition.” The narratives of fabled and historical heroes alike had been “convayed by tradition in loose and broken fragments”; collected by the poets they were “interwoven with instructing Mythologies.”¹² In Ovid's work, they were further collated into a kind of encyclopedic Metamorphosis—the striking singular form of the title was common usage throughout the Renaissance. Thus described, Ovid appears almost as a prototypical Bacon, gathering together in parabolic form the entire history and wisdom of antiquity—those fragments of philosophy “scattered here and there like planks from a shipwreck.”¹³

Sandys's own manner of presentation might well be described as the sort of eccentricity which necessarily attends the arrival of a modern or scientific spirit.¹⁴ But it is clear from Sandys's delight in his material that the attractions of Baconian exposition do not outweigh the pleasures or the uses of the parabolic method itself (also Baconian). For all his intention to deliver the “Philosophicall sense” of the Metamorphoses, Sandys reminds us that the method was recommended by Plato and other more “prudent Law-givers, in their reducing of the old World to civilitie”; and that it was a common practice of the “sacred Pen-men” themselves.¹⁵ His own work is shaped by the notion that the fables collected by Ovid are “more ancient then any extant Author, or perhaps then Letters themselves; before which, as they expressed their Conceptions in Hieroglyphickes, so did they their Philosophie and Divinitie under Fables and Parables.”¹⁶ Were not these same tales “most obscurely and perplexedly delivered by all, but the supernaturally inspired Moses”?¹⁷ Sandys's loyalties are thus divided between the claims of philosophic “sense” and of parable, which makes “a deeper impression, then can be made by the livelesse precepts of Philosophie.”¹⁸ As a result, he frequently seems quite uncertain whether he has lit upon the “sense” of a fable or further documented the territory of divine mystery. Even within the precincts of a commentary, the life of fable mattered as much as its sense. The magnificent engravings which precede each book of the 1632 folio underscore the double heritage which proved so fascinating to later poets; in Sandys's words, they further “contracted the substance” of the book into a single emblematic “figure,” a “silent Poesie.”¹⁹

Notes

1. Dryden, Preface to Fables Ancient and Modern (1700). For the life and work of Sandys, see Richard Beale Davis, George Sandys, Poet-Adventurer (London: The Bodley Head, 1955).

2. Davis, p. 140.

3. Karl K. Hulley and Stanley T. Vandersall, eds., Ovid's Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologized, and Represented in Figures by George Sandys (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), p. 3; 1632, Dedication 1.

4. Douglas Bush, Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry (rev. ed. New York: Norton, 1963), p. 254.

5. Hulley and Vandersall, p. 48; 1632, p. 18.

6. Hulley and Vandersall, p. 607; 1632, p. 448.

7. Hulley and Vandersall, p. 295; 1632, p. 224.

8. Hulley and Vandersall, p. 48; 1632, p. 18.

9. Hulley and Vandersall, p. 8; 1632, Reader 1.

10. Hulley and Vandersall, p. 9; 1632, Reader 2.

11. Hulley and Vandersall, pp. 8-9; 1632, Reader 1. Sandys's phrasing is close to Bacon's: “The most ancient times (except what is preserved of them in the scriptures) are buried in oblivion and silence: to that silence succeeded the fables of the poets: to those fables the written records which have come down to us. Thus between the hidden depths of antiquity and the days of tradition and evidence that followed there is drawn a veil, as it were, of fables, which come in and occupy the middle region that separates what has perished from what survives.” (Preface to The Wisdom of the Ancients, in Spedding, Ellis, Heath, eds., The Works of Francis Bacon, VI [London: Longmans, 1858], p. 695.)

12. Hulley and Vandersall, p. 9; 1632, Reader 1-2.

13. Bacon, The Wisdom of the Ancients (“Orpheus”), Works, p. 722.

14. See the qualified statement of Douglas Bush in Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry (rev. ed. New York: W. W. Norton Co., 1963), ch. XIII; and the same author's Foreword in Hulley and Vandersall, xii.

15. Hulley and Vandersall, p. 8; 1632, Reader 1.

16. Hulley and Vandersall, p. 8; 1632, Reader 1.

17. Hulley and Vandersall, p. 9; 1632, Reader 2.

18. Hulley and Vandersall, p. 8; 1632, Reader 1.

19. Hulley and Vandersall, p. 9; 1632, Reader 2.