SOURCE: Hart, F. Elizabeth. “Cerimon's ‘Rough’ Music in Pericles, 3.2.” Shakespeare Quarterly 51, no. 3 (fall 2000): 313-31.

[In the following essay, Hart argues that analysis of the adjective “rough” in Cerimon's phrase “rough music” points to the mother goddess Diana as the controlling deity of the play.]

Shakespeare's use of “rough” in The Tempest to describe the magic that Prospero must “abjure” (5.1.50, 51) has inspired debate over the adjective's meaning, some critics finding in it the key not only to Prospero's powers but to the play as a whole.¹ A less well-studied but similarly ambiguous use of “rough” occurs in the 1609 quarto of Pericles (Q1), where it modifies the “Musick” that precedes Cerimon's revival of Thaisa, Pericles's presumed-dead wife and queen (sig. E4^r).² Owing to the questionable status of Q1 Pericles, however, “rough” in this case has frequently been emended to “still” in important editions, including the Arden; the Cambridge; the Penguin; and, most recently, the Oxford, from which the word “still” has been adopted for mass pedagogical use by the Norton Shakespeare.³ While rough music does present interpretive difficulties in the context of a dire medical emergency, I will argue here that its emendation is not necessary. Rough music may, in fact, be critical to an understanding of the healing powers of Cerimon, a minor character whom critics and directors often treat as an early modern practitioner of occult magic despite the classical setting and context in which he is presented.⁴

The Q1 passage in question appears as follows, featuring Cerimon as speaker:

Well sayd, well sayd; the fire and clothes: the rough and
Wofull Musick that we haue, cause it to sound beseech you:
The Violl once more; how thou stirr'st thou blocke?
The Musicke there: I pray you giue her ayre. …

(sig. E4^r)

Bolstered by a parallel moment in The Painfull Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre, a 1608 novelized version of the play by the London innkeeper George Wilkins, some editors have substituted Wilkins's descriptor “still” on the assumption that “Wofull” music is more likely to be dulcet in tone than the “rough” of quarto description.⁵ (The passage from Wilkins reads: “[T]hen calling softly to the Gentlemen who were witnesses about him, he bade them that they should commaund some still musicke to sound” [emphasis added].⁶) Of the various definitions the Oxford English Dictionary gives for still, the archaic meaning of “Subdued, soft, not loud” as applied to sounds does nicely complement the somberness implied in “wofull.”⁷ The phrase still music was even current in the seventeenth century, appearing, as it happens, in a stage direction in the final scene of As You Like It (5.4.106 s.d.). By contrast, the OED's [Oxford English Dictionary] applicable meanings for rough—“discordant, harsh,” “wanting grace or refinement, rude, unpolished, rugged”—all seem contradictory to the tone we might imagine for a scene of such solemnity. And according to the OED, the phrase rough music does not appear to have become current in the language until the early eighteenth century—except, it would seem, in the case of the skimmington or charivari, where rough music was an integral aspect of that specific ritual of social control.⁸

A preference for “still” would also seem to be supported by Cerimon's request that his assistants bring him a “Violl,” apparently a reference to the stringed instrument familiar to us as a viola or violin. However, editors have differed in their glossing of this word, too, frequently emending “Violl” to “vial”—a container for medicine—and noting that in the parallel passage from John Gower's Confessio Amantis, one of two principal sources for Pericles, Cerimon is said to “put a licour in hir mouthe.”⁹ The confusion is heightened by the variable spellings of words for both senses. The OED notes that while viol was available as a spelling for the musical instrument, the spelling violl was more closely associated with a “vessel of a small or moderate size used for holding liquids” than it was with the instrument, whose spelling variations actually tended more toward our modern-day spelling of vial.¹⁰ The spelling violl clearly means the musical instrument earlier in the play when Pericles conceives of Antiochus's daughter as a “faire Violl” whose “stringes … finger'd make [for] man his lawfull musicke” (sig. A3^v). These orthographic variations aptly illustrate what Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass consider an added dimension of materiality in early modern texts, a materiality based on scribal and print slippage whose histories are “so specific that [they] cannot comply with modern notions of correctness and intelligibility.”¹¹

While the discussion that follows may seem like much ado over a minor passage in a play fraught with greater difficulties, the status of this passage as a genuine crux is supported by the fact that few editions agree on how to interpret it. Its possible relevance, as well, to the play's many other uses of music make the nature of the music represented in any given scene an issue of some thematic importance. Indeed, references to music are so numerous in Pericles that, as one critic puts it, “[T]here is scarcely any significant action in the play that is not directly related to music.”¹² Critics stress music's restorative powers and its emblematic function—typical in all Shakespeare's romances—as symbols of divine harmony.¹³ Music as a healing agent is mentioned, in fact, at the very beginning of the play, in the opening lines of Gower's first chorus:

To sing a song that old was sung,
From ashes ancient Gower is come,
Assuming man's infirmities
To glad your ear and please your eyes.
It hath been sung at festivals,
On ember eves and holy-ales;
And lords and ladies in their lives
Have read it for restoratives.

(1.Cho.1-8)

These lines characterize the play as itself an old song that the medieval poet has returned from the dead specially to sing to this modern theater audience. Gower allies this song with “festivals,” “ember eves and holy-ales,” and points out its function within English folk tradition (both heard and “read”) as a restorative. At the play's end, song as “sacred physic” (5.1.77) figures prominently in Marina's successful use of music to stir Pericles from his paralyzing melancholy. Its emblematic function emerges shortly afterwards as Pericles's ears are opened to the “music of the spheres” (l. 233), a “heavenly music” (l. 236) that signifies the play's newly harmonized analogies between human and cosmic orders.

My argument defending rough music will contradict none of these impressions of music's sacred and restorative qualities in the play. Rather, I extend this view by suggesting a classical context in which a rough music could indeed be understood as sacred—an aspect of an organized religious practice that Cerimon as a character may loosely represent. Although Cerimon speaks fewer than a hundred lines in the play, his key role as facilitator or master of ceremonies is apparent even in the sound of his name.¹⁴ He presents himself early in 3.2 as a gentleman-physician who eschews the “tottering honor” of nobility for the “secret art” of nature's curatives—“the blest infusions / That dwells in vegetives, in metals, stones” (ll. 42, 34, 37-38). While it is understandable that some have interpreted these lines as an allusion to the occult, I would argue that the emphasis here lies not so much on magic as it does on “physic”—medicine—which Cerimon has used to “restore” the lives of his fellow Ephesians (“Your honor has through Ephesus poured forth / Your charity, and hundreds call themselves / Your creatures” [ll. 45-47], remarks the Second Gentleman). Cerimon confesses that his motive for studying physic has been to achieve “immortality”—to acquire proximity to, if not an actual identification with, the gods—far more than to enhance his nobility:

                                                                                                    I hold it ever
Virtue and cunning were endowments greater
Than nobleness and riches. Careless heirs
May the two latter darken and expend,
But immortality attends the former,
Making a man a god.

(ll. 28-33)

Although he is clearly not a deity, the play seems to hint at his near approach to the divine: upon Thaisa's awakening, the First Gentleman exclaims to Cerimon, “The heavens / Through you, increase our wonder and sets up / Your fame forever” (ll. 97-99). The final scene's reconciliations echo this wonder, underscoring Cerimon's success as an intercessor between human and divine. Pericles wonders “who to thank” for “this great miracle” of his wife's return (5.3.59, 60). Thaisa's response—“Lord Cerimon, … / Through whom the gods have shown their power”—provokes Pericles's declaration “The gods can have no mortal officer / More like a god than [Cerimon]” (ll. 61-62, 64-65).

In this essay I will suggest that “rough” as a descriptor for Cerimon's music hints at a link between the healing powers of his “secret art” and the mysteries of the archaic goddesses who were associated with the ancient city of Ephesus, the setting for all of Cerimon's appearances in the play. Cerimon calls on Apollo and Aesculapius to guide him (3.2.69, 114), but the god whom he most actively serves is Diana of Ephesus, to whose temple and wishes he obviously has access. According to recent scholarship on Roman religious culture, this Diana of Ephesus—as distinct from Ovid's Diana—is best understood with respect to the Mother-worship that flourished in the territory of Phrygia, the home province of Ephesus and also of ancient Troy. Included in the forms of Phrygian Mother-worship was a particularly jarring kind of music, often practiced by a conspicuous class of priest. The central deity defining this culture was Cybele, whose characteristics had been transferred over the centuries to Diana of Ephesus. The play's connection between Cerimon and rough music may thus indicate the nature of Cerimon's service to Diana, whose ties to the culture of Cybelian Mother-worship were available to the Renaissance through classical literature and commentary and through contemporary Italian mythography. Cerimon's proximity to Diana of Ephesus endows him with the healing powers that, historically speaking, were a principal function of the Asian mystery rites.

Before proceeding with an argument focused on a single disputed word in the text, I feel it necessary to address this play's troubled textual history; in particular, I hope to clarify my own position on the collaboration theories that have shaped most editors' approach to its analysis. Many readers, beginning in the first century after Pericles was written, have detected a difference in style between the play's first two and final three acts, a difference so marked that some of the play's earliest editors suspected a hand other than Shakespeare's at work in Acts 1 and 2. This suspicion is fed by the fact that Pericles was omitted from the First Folio of 1623, presumably (or so editors have speculated) because Heminge and Condell were aware that the play was not solely Shakespeare's. The lack of a Folio version makes all-important comparisons between contemporary editions impossible. This is unfortunate since the only period edition available to us, the 1609 quarto, suffers from erratic lineation, inconsistent spelling, scenes containing references to missing actions, and myriad other problems that recent editors have ascribed to poor memorial reporting or compositorial error (or both). To address these problems, editors have long resorted to importing words, phrases, and even stage directions from Wilkins's Painfull Aduentures of Pericles Prince of Tyre, assuming, since Wilkins's novel was obviously written to capitalize on the stage version's popularity, that it must claim some degree of authority. This logic has shifted in recent years to the conviction that Wilkins must have been Shakespeare's mysterious collaborator, and much effort has gone into attempts to prove this hypothesis using computer-driven statistical analysis.¹⁵

But critics of the Wilkins collaboration theory—and indeed of the very idea of collaboration—are becoming increasingly vocal in their dissent, raising points that urge the debate back to its root assumptions. David Bergeron has commented, for instance, that “Part of the problem is the ancient one of Shakespearean criticism: when encountering poorly written passages or ones that offend morally, always postulate the possibility of another writer clandestinely at work.”¹⁶ New Cambridge editors Doreen DelVecchio and Antony Hammond reject not only the collaboration theory and the idea of Wilkins as collaborator but also a related theory that Q1 Pericles was a memorial text (and hence a “bad” quarto), assigning most of the problems that have led to these theories to compositorial error or “the usual errors of misreading a difficult script. …”¹⁷ One of the original reasons for suspecting collaboration, the fact that Pericles does not appear in the First Folio, actually indicates little, say DelVecchio and Hammond, since the Folio does include other plays, such as Henry VIII and Macbeth, that we now know or suspect to be collaborative efforts. Furthermore, they argue, radical style changes occur throughout the canon and must always “be considered very carefully in … dramaturgical context, rather than in stylistic literary isolation,” where “literary taste” becomes “an uncertain arbiter.”¹⁸ The New Cambridge editors may be the boldest among the dissenters, but their view finds support in the recent work of some new historicists, who have quietly disregarded the authorship issue altogether, demonstrating through their variety of readings that it is possible to find, if not stylistic unity, then at least a degree of ideological coherence that binds together the disputed portions of the play.¹⁹

The controversy has advanced to a level of complex and competing scenarios that are now met with equally complicated rejoinders. However, the arguments on both sides remain conjectural. For the purposes of my limited analysis, let me say that I find the dissenters' arguments more persuasive, especially considering that the origins of the debate are largely ideological. To compound this problem, it now seems that the idealism inherent in centuries of bardolatry is not the only ideology framing the discussion: DelVecchio and Hammond accuse the Oxford editors of operating “gleefully” in their use of statistical evidence to determine collaboration not just in Pericles but in a range of Shakespeare's plays, hinting that their desire to undercut Shakespeare's status is reactionary.²⁰ Where its “reconstruction” of the text of Pericles is concerned, the Oxford edition “carried the belief of the editors … that [Wilkins] is essentially more reliable than Q to extraordinary extremes, re-writing its text as the fancy took them, and for trivial reasons.”²¹ This charge is particularly true, I say, in the case of “rough music,” which occurs in 3.2, the portion of the play which even the staunchest of collaboration theorists agree was probably written by Shakespeare.²² Given the fact that no one seriously disputes Shakespeare's hand in 3.2, the ease with which editors have simply substituted “still” for “rough” in the passage in question strikes me as a symptom of a general unwillingness even to try to make sense of the problems we are faced with in Q1. While the argument I present below is equally speculative, it at least attempts to historicize rough music—to offer a classical context and meaning for the crux that goes beyond the limits of internal evidence.

In keeping, therefore, with this imperative to historicize, I contend that there is a context in which rough music may turn out to be peculiarly appropriate if we take into account 3.2's setting in Ephesus, the fact that in the ancient world Ephesus was the world-renowned center of worship for the goddess Diana, and the probability that the Ephesian Diana bore associations with a form of cult music well known to the Romans and notorious for its “savagery.” Ephesus, though properly the domain of the Greek goddess Artemis, became more familiarly associated with Diana under Roman rule in the first century bc and continued to be associated with her in the Latin-leaning Renaissance. The prominence in Pericles of the Ephesian Diana, who appears to Pericles in a dream vision in 5.1, and of her famous temple, which serves as the backdrop for the play's final scene, should prompt our curiosity about the extent to which she was known to the early moderns. Ultimately, Diana figures in my argument by virtue of her overlay onto the much older Phrygian goddess Cybele whom Artemis supplanted in a synthesis of metaphors not unlike other syntheses that took place in the aftermath of Roman colonization.

There is evidence that Shakespeare and his audience would have recognized this Diana as distinct from Ovid's Diana, the chaste huntress and goddess of the moon to whom line glosses in modern editions typically refer. Post-Reformation, Bible-literate playgoers would have recognized Ephesus from the Acts of the Apostles, in which Paul's missionary activities in the city of Ephesus provoke a riot among the craftsmen of Diana's temple, who repeatedly cry out “Great is Diana of the Ephesians!”²³ The traditional reputation of Ephesus as an occult setting may derive initially from these passages in Scripture, where newly converted Christians who had used “curious artes” “broght their bokes, and burned them before all men.”²⁴ Diana's perceived agency within early modern discourse on demonology is exemplified by Cambridge theologian James Mason's The Anatomie of Sorcerie, a book devoted to defining and cataloguing the “mischieuous deuice[s]” of those in Mason's acquaintance who were reputedly learned in the occult.²⁵ Mason's diatribe against the practices of “Charmers, Inchanters, and such like” begins with a reading from Acts 19:11-16 and dwells at length on the “superstitious” practices associated with Diana:

And it is manifest by histories, that the Ephesians were giuen to such like superstition; for it is recorded in diuers authors: That in the Image Diana, which was worshipped at Ephesus, there were certaine obscure words, or sentences not agreeing together, nor depending one vpon another; much like vnto riddles written vpon the feete, girdle, and crowne of the said Diana: the which if a man did vse, hauing written them out, and carrying them about him, hee should haue good lucke in all his businesses: and hereof sprung the prouerbe, Ephesiæ literæ: where one vseth any thing which bringeth good successe.²⁶

In citing the Ephesiæ literæ proverb, Mason shows the currency of folk wisdom in England that focused on the iconic details of Diana's temple statue—the “many-breasted Artemis” that scholars study to this day.

But there were other early modern discourses in which an Ephesian Diana would have been a distinct figure, including one that was far more ameliorative and which circulated among the literati—the discourse on ancient mythology. A familiar subject in the history of this period, the Renaissance “rediscovery” of paganism has been thoroughly documented by Jean Seznec and Don Cameron Allen.²⁷ Their studies, though fully comprehensive of classical culture, are noticeably marked by an emphasis on influences from Asia Minor, on what Seznec and Allen characterize as centuries of integration of “Oriental” mythology into medieval Europe's understanding of the classical narratives of Greece and Rome.²⁸ Their focus on the East has gained support in recent years from the classical history and literary scholarship of Walter Burkert, Robert Turcan, Margaret Doody, and M. L. West, each of whom explores different aspects of ancient, early Christian, and medieval cultures as they were influenced by eastern cultures.²⁹ Of these scholars, Burkert may prove the most relevant for early modern studies through his claim that the comparative loss of eastern elements from the modern inventory of classical mythology was a late development—an eighteenth-century phenomenon not to be assumed of earlier classicisms.³⁰ Early modern classicism, Burkert's and others' studies imply, may well have included elements of eastern cultures to a degree not obvious to us as we regard it through the prism of an eighteenth-century revisionism.

As Seznec and Allen have noted, the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries saw the composition and widespread translation of Italian-authored manuals detailing the iconographic features of classical mythological figures, encyclopedias of the pagan world modeled on Boccaccio's fourteenth-century Genealogia deorum gentilium libri.³¹ These scrupulous compilations of ancient symbology became indispensable guides to pre-Christian belief which, as Allen declares, “no seventeenth-century scholar, man of letters, or artist could do without.”³² Some of these manuals actively focus attention on the gods and goddesses of Rome's eastern provinces, mingling them and occasionally confusing their functions with the gods and goddesses of official Roman origin. Three in particular—manuals by Vincenzo Cartari, Lilio Gregorio Giraldi, and Natale Conti—were popular among English artists, poets, playwrights, and masque composers. Of these, Cartari's Imagines deorum (translated in 1599 as The Fovntaine of Ancient Fiction. Wherein is liuely depictured the Images and Statues of the gods and the Ancients) was the most attuned to eastern religious culture, giving what Seznec calls “extraordinary prominence” to the “Oriental cults.”³³ Cartari's influence on Jonson, Daniel, Marston, Chapman, and—speculatively, at least—on Shakespeare has been argued in the past by Seznec, D. J. Gordon, and John Peacock.³⁴

Manuals such as Cartari's bespeak an early modern sensitivity that may account for the traditional popularity of the Apollonius tale—the Greco-Asian story on which Pericles is based—and, perhaps, the otherwise-puzzling popularity of Shakespeare's play in his day. Thought to be a folktale of Hellenistic Greece, the story of Apollonius survives in its earliest written form in a second- or third-century Latin manuscript entitled Historia Apollonii regis tyri. The Middle Ages produced hundreds of versions of this tale in numerous languages, including Russian, Hungarian, Icelandic, and Danish, as well as French, Italian, Spanish, and English. The fourteenth century saw its inclusion in the Gesta Romanorum and in Gower's Confessio Amantis, two prime sources of moralistic fables for generations of English writers. In writing Pericles, Shakespeare consulted not only Gower's poem but also a fictional account of Apollonius by Lawrence Twine, a sixteenth-century contemporary whose narrative The Patterne of Painefull Adventures was reprinted several times over the course of Shakespeare's career. Yet despite the tale's dissemination and longevity, it managed to preserve distinct marks of its ancient Greco-Asian origins, not least of which were a setting along the Aegean and the providential role of an eastern Mother goddess, Diana of Ephesus. This Diana remains a constant throughout the story's history, her function as a dea ex machina iterated in retellings from late antiquity to Gower and eventually to Twine, Wilkins, and Shakespeare.³⁵

But the Apollonius tale was not the only available fictional account of the Ephesian Diana: the latter decades of the sixteenth century had seen the translation and publication of several other Greek and Roman novels composed in the Far-Eastern provinces of the Roman Empire between 100-600 ad.³⁶ That these works enjoyed a popular readership in the Renaissance is clear by their multiple translations and editions and by the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century commentaries they inspired.³⁷ While it is generally accepted that these fictions must have served as models for Shakespeare, what has been less obvious is their pattern of representations of divine providence—the extent, that is, to which they repeatedly represent eastern goddesses and Diana of Ephesus in particular as figures central to their spiritual economies. For example, both the Historia Apollonii and the Confessio Amantis end at the Ephesian temple of Diana; it is therefore no surprise that Shakespeare ends Pericles in the same place. But so, too, does Achilles Tatius's Loves of Clitophon and Leucippe, a narrative not identified as a source for Shakespeare but one that had only recently come to the attention of London readers when Pericles appeared on the stage.³⁸ In Tatius's story two lovers from the city of Tyre endure separation, enslavement, and tests of their chastity, only to be miraculously reunited in the temple of Diana at Ephesus. Similarly, in Heliodorus's Aethiopian Historie, a fiction translated in 1569 and a primary source for Sidney's Arcadia, the mysterious Ethiopian-born heroine is linked to both the Egyptian Isis and, by her own declaration of allegiance, Diana of Ephesus. William Adlington's 1566 translation of Apuleius's The Golden Ass, an acknowledged source for many of Shakespeare's plays, displays details of the culture of eastern goddess worship to an extent unmatched in classical literature. The eleventh book of Apuleius's novel represents the mysteries of Isis, who in a dream vision presents herself to the hero as a grand compendium of Mediterranean goddesses, including, she states, “the sister of the good Phœbus [Diana, who is] … now adored in the sacred places of Ephesus.”³⁹ The direct intervention of Diana of Ephesus into the lives of Pericles and his fractured family, while a relatively unusual device in drama, is so typical in these novels as to constitute a literary motif.

As presented in these various sixteenth-century discourses, from the Bible and demonological tracts to mythographical manuals and popular fiction, Diana of Ephesus would have connoted an eastern persona for Shakespeare's audience, one distinct from the persona of her Ovidian counterpart. But how might Diana's Ephesian identity inform Cerimon's rough music in Pericles, 3.2? My sense is that the connection to rough music lies not so much in Diana herself but in the more archaic Cybele, some of whose traits, as I mentioned earlier, were passed to Diana by geographical coincidence. Cybele was one of the great Bronze Age Mother goddesses who for thousands of years had dominated in Greece, Syria, Canaan, and Egypt.⁴⁰ Like these other Mothers, Cybele of Phrygia was a dual personification of the earth and moon, representing nature and fertility, cosmic as well as earthly time, and the life-and-death cycles of both human and vegetative existence. During the classical era she was associated with a subordinated male companion, Attis, who served her as both lover and son, and whose mythical castration, death, and resurrection provided the basis for springtime agricultural festivals.

The history of Cybele under Roman rule is inseparable from the larger history of the eastern cults' slow incorporation into the mainstream of Roman culture.⁴¹ Officially introduced to the city in 204 bc, Cybele was at first regarded as a foreigner, the favored deity of slaves, immigrants, and merchants from Asia who had congregated mostly in Italian port cities. But once a temple to her had been erected in Rome, the practices of her cult, along with others from the East, inspired devotion among a “mass of individuals” whom Robert Turcan describes as “receptive to … exotic forms of worship.”⁴² According to Turcan, “[E]astern religions … offered the attraction of strong feelings and emotions. Their liturgies excited and aroused the senses of those who were henceforth left cold by the strictly formalist worship of the Roman gods.”⁴³ By the imperial period and particularly under Claudius, Cybele was “well and truly officialized,” her image appearing on Roman coins and her status appropriated by Roman empresses, some of whom generated iconography of themselves either as or with symbolic images of the goddess.⁴⁴ For centuries, March was Cybele's festival month, marking the anniversary of her entry into Rome. When Claudius instituted an April festival in honor of Attis, there began a popular combined festival for both. The hilaria (“joy”) that ended this festival took on “the air of an exuberant carnival,” not unlike the later medieval Carnival with its emphasis on masquerade and its alternating phases of solemnity and release, the latter expressed in displays of mass abandon.⁴⁵

Such details become relevant when we consider two aspects of Cybele's cult that earned it a reputation among Romans for “savagery,” an opinion repeated in commentaries available to early modern students of Roman history. In such commentaries two traits become systematically linked and contribute to the construction of a general category of social other—the Phrygian—within Roman culture. The first such trait was the appearance and behavior of Cybele's priests, who, contrary to what we might expect, were mostly male. These priests, called galli, acknowledged the feminine roots of the cult by methodically effeminizing themselves, growing their hair long and wearing women's clothing in public appearances. But their most arresting display of self-emasculation—the spectacle in the frenzy of spring festivities that brought them universal renown—was self-castration in imitation of Attis. The Greeks had outlawed the castration of priests wherever Cybele's cult appeared on their mainland. But in Rome the practice, although strictly forbidden for Roman citizens, flourished among ethnic Phrygians and was often performed to the fascination of Roman crowds. Cybele's eunuchs thus gained lasting notoriety, casting a vivid image of gender transgression and sexual mutilation on the tableau of city life: “Once a year, during the April festivals, the galli were permitted to dance through the streets of Rome to the sounds of auloi and tambourines, in their exotic ‘get-up,’ with their feminine garments, long hair and amulets. At that time they were allowed to make door-to-door collections, for the upkeep of the temple and its emasculated staff.”⁴⁶

The second trait—the one most relevant to my argument defending rough music—was the riotous clangor of the Phrygian music, “the sounds of auloi and tambourines” noted just above. Harsh music had long been associated with Cybele's cult and mysteries. Iconography often placed her with certain musical instruments, the timbrel (tambourine) and cymbal predominantly but also the drum, horn, reed flute, twin flute, straight and curved pipes, and possibly a primitive form of organ.⁴⁷ These instruments were part of festival celebrations and so became popularly identified with the orgiastic elements in the cult—with the frenzy that in previous centuries had been likened by the Greeks to the mania of Dionysus.⁴⁸ Percussive music has been traced to Cybele's liturgy dating back to the seventh century bc, but given speculation that her Hittite name Kubaba meant “cymbal,” it may go back even further.⁴⁹ Significantly for the purposes of my argument about Cerimon, such instruments played a key role in the performance of her mystery rites, whose text, according to early Christian observers, included the statement “‘From the tambourine I have eaten; from the cymbal I have drunk’.”⁵⁰

The extent to which Cybele's priests were associated with their music is evident from Latin commentary, the abundance of which supports the probability that Cybele, her eunuchs, and their distinctive sound were similarly known and linked in the Renaissance. The authorities' attitudes range from hostility to the cult's popular following (Varro, Seneca, Tacitus, Cicero, Juvenal, and Augustine) to disdainful fascination with the spectacle of the galli (Lucretius, Ovid) to open admiration and a willingness to make use of Cybele's mythic ties to Rome—her guardianship over Phrygian Troy—in order to generate an ideology of empire and civilization (Virgil, Ovid). A description from Lucretius's De rerum natura offers an example of the quality of detail that would have been available to early modern Latin readers.⁵¹ Here Lucretius narrates a clear association between Cybele's “Capon-priests” (so-called because capons, or gelded roosters, do not father offspring) and the “crashing and clashing” and “threats blared raw on the horn” that were, for the Romans, unmistakably Phrygian:

Various peoples …
Call upon “Mother Ida” and give her troops
Of Phrygian followers, for, they say, from Phrygia
The “phruited” fields first spread for all the world.
Capon-priests they assign her—they wish to show
That those who sully the Mother's Law, those found
Ungrateful to their parents, are unworthy
To bear their children live to the shores of light.
Palm-thunder on drums drawn taut—the crashing and clashing
Of cymbals about her—threats blared raw on the horn—
With the pipe and the Phrygian tempo they whip to a frenzy
And brandish the daggers, the signs of their fury and bloodshed,
That the crowd of sinners in their thankless hearts
Will quake with fear before her Majesty.(52)

Virgil, perhaps influenced by Lucretius, similarly describes the “Corybantes” (priests) of the “Mother goddess” as wielding their “Brazen ringing cups” in the sacred groves of Mount Ida.⁵³ And Ovid, in his Fasti, a source for Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece, writes of feeling “daunted by the shrill cymbal's clash and the bent flute's thrilling drone” as the “unmanly” priests of “the Idean Mother” bear an effigy of the goddess through the streets of Rome.⁵⁴

Negative descriptions of Cybele's cult outnumber and outweigh the sympathetic by far—Augustine even devotes entire sections of his De civitate Dei to criticizing it.⁵⁵ But evidently the hostility of Latin authorities did not always inspire the same response from Renaissance commentators. For example, among the Italian mythographical manuals discussed earlier, the Imagines deorum of Vincenzo Cartari displays deep respect for the eastern cults in its presentation of them. In the process of cataloguing the eastern deities and their symbolism, Cartari offers examples to show not only the details of Cybele's Phrygianism but also the status of Diana as inheritor of that Phrygianism. Cartari correlates Diana through her moon aspect first to Isis, then to Ceres, and finally to Cybele, noting that among Diana's featured icons is the “Timbrell of Cibele.”⁵⁶ There are also literary precedents contemporary with Shakespeare's Pericles that represent the Mother cults of which Cybele/Diana was a part as ideologically useful to the construction of English national identity and sometimes even as a legitimate expression of quasi-Christian spirituality. Certain of the Elizabethan poets, including Spenser, imitated Virgil in exploiting the implications of Cybele's Trojan history and iconography.⁵⁷ And the popular translations of the Greek and Roman novels discussed earlier offered representations of pagan spirituality that may have been modeled specifically on the mystery rites of the East, including, as we have seen, those of Diana of Ephesus.⁵⁸ Of these narratives, the one most frequently cited as a source for Shakespeare, The Golden Ass, features elements in its Isis episode that resemble what I have been describing as Phrygian styles of ritual and celebration. The popularity of these novels suggests early modern interest in the mystery rites that they allude to or represent.

Archaeology has given scholars a sense of these mystery rites—who engaged in them, what occasion prompted them, and how they differed from or resembled the Christianity that superseded them. Walter Burkert writes that the eastern mysteries echoed the votive religions of primitive societies, in which individuals made vows to the gods in return for protections of a practical, worldly nature. The difficulties—seafaring and illness—that Burkert claims inspired the most votive offerings also happen to be prominently featured in the ancient Apollonius tale.⁵⁹ The mystery-like flavor of the original tale bears implications, I would say, for later renderings of it and for Shakespeare's rendering in Pericles, in which major characters periodically pledge oaths or offer prayers directly to Diana.

Returning now to my core argument, Cerimon's use of “secret art” to restore Thaisa in 3.2 implies the unfolding of not just a mystery rite but of a rite that is specifically Phrygian in character, an atmospherics that might have been sufficiently coded through Cerimon's call—in the midst of his performance of a miracle—for a “rough” kind of music. Acting as intercessor between the human and divine, Cerimon uses what in this context is a sacred music to heal human suffering, thereby fulfilling the role of priest. He is a human being who nevertheless becomes “like a god,” a seer “Through whom the gods have shown their power” (5.3.65, 62). I am not suggesting that he is a eunuch, like the priests of Cybele—there are no such hints in the play. He is, however, a man exercising knowledge, access, and privilege within the domain of a known Phrygian Mother goddess.⁶⁰ His maleness, combined with the play's timely reference to rough music, provides just the right detail, even without a reference to castration, to enable an audience familiar with Diana to fill out this portrait of Cerimon as her priest. The adjective “rough” may open a window onto a quality of early modern classical eclecticism that scholars such as Burkert are now encouraging us to recognize.

The significance of rough music as an indicator of religious Phrygianism has an impact, no doubt, on other aspects of the play besides Cerimon. It is a curious thing that Pericles at times approximates the appearance of a priest of Cybele, more so than Cerimon, as a result of the oath Pericles makes to “bright Diana” (3.3.30) to grow his hair long.⁶¹ Shakespeare places more emphasis on this oath than do either of his sources, having Pericles pledge it not once, as in Gower and Twine, but twice and on two separate occasions.⁶² The result, after sixteen years of growth, is a striking stage focus on long and decidedly male hair. By representing Pericles's devotions to Diana in this appropriately gendered way, Shakespeare is able to gather all three family members—father as well as mother and daughter—into Cerimon's world of service to the Mother.

Such a matrix of devotions would complement current interpretations of the play's monarchical ideology in terms of the competing interests of the ruler and his commonwealth, figured as father and mother respectively. As Constance Jordan has articulated this configuration, the monarch-father must learn to bend his destructive impulses to the nurture of the commonwealth-mother if he is to avoid falling into tyranny. Such a bending requires the tempering effects of divine law, which Jordan locates in the empowered chastity of the daughter Marina.⁶³ To the extent that Marina's divinity stems from her own devotions to “her mistress Dian” (4.Cho.29)—“Diana aid my purpose!” (4.2.148)—then the ultimate source of power in the play is obviously Diana herself, this Mother of Phrygia whose “sacred physic” is repeatedly expressed in music. Consistent, however, with the play's classical context, the forms that Diana's music takes differ according to characters' gender and station, appearing variously and at appropriate moments in the “rough” percussions of the male priest Cerimon; in the “sweet” harmonics of the “vestal” Marina (5.1.46; 4.5.7); and ultimately in King Pericles's privileged experience of the “heavenly” “music of the spheres.”

Notes

1. See Robert Egan, “‘This Rough Magic’: Perspectives of Art and Morality in The Tempest,” Shakespeare Quarterly 23 (1972): 171-82; and Cosmo Corfield, “Why Does Prospero Abjure His ‘Rough Magic’?” SQ 36 (1985): 31-48. Corfield casts the debate in these terms: “What is required is an account of The Tempest that will adequately explain why Prospero can ‘prize’ his magic at the beginning yet find it ‘rough’ at the end—an account that will adequately link his return to Milan with his magical disenchantment” (31). Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare follow The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington, 4^th ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).

2. Quotations of Q1 follow the fascimile edition Shakespeare's Plays in Quarto, Michael J. B. Allen and Kenneth Muir, eds. (Berkeley: U of California P, 1981).

3. See the Arden Shakespeare Pericles, ed. F. D. Hoeniger (London: Methuen, 1963); the Cambridge Shakespeare Pericles, ed. J. C. Maxwell (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1956); Pericles, Prince of Tyre, ed. James G. McManaway (New York: Penguin, 1977); William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987); and Pericles, Prince of Tyre in The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).

4. Walter Cohen, for instance, calls Thaisa's revival “quasi-magical” (The Norton Shakespeare, 2,712); and David Bevington groups Cerimon with “a number of mysterious artist-figures and magicians [of] the late romances” (1,400). Doreen DelVecchio and Antony Hammond complain that “all recent directors seem determined to ignore the text and make Cerimon some sort of witch-doctor” (Pericles, Prince of Tyre, ed. DelVecchio and Hammond [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998], 72n).

5. The Riverside editors note this possibility but dismiss it as being “graphically very difficult” (1,514). Bevington does not mention “still” but provides a footnote explaining the apparent confusion generated by retaining Q1's “rough”: “Cerimon may be apologizing for the only music he can provide at short notice” (1,418n). Similarly, the 1956 Cambridge edition posits no alternatives but attempts a conciliatory interpretation based on internal evidence: “Cerimon wants not soothing, sweet music, but stimulating music, music that will penetrate Thaisa's coma” (195). Hoeniger in his Arden edition flatly declares “rough” to be “manifestly wrong” but admits that “still” is also “quite uncertain” (91n). The Folger Library General Reader's edition uses “rough” without comment. To cite editions mentioned here that have not already been cited in full above: eds. G. Blakemore Evans and J. J. M. Tobin, Pericles, Prince of Tyre in The Riverside Shakespeare, 2d ed. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997); and Pericles, Prince of Tyre, The Folger Library General Reader's Shakespeare, ed. Louis B. Wright and Virginia A. LaMar (New York: Washington Square Press, 1968).

6. George Wilkins, The Painfull Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre (London, 1608), quoted here from Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols. (London and Hanley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957-75), 6:492-548, esp. 523.

7. The Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed., prep. J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), s.v. still.

8. The OED traces the first use of charivari to the early eighteenth century, when presumably rough music also came into general usage. But as many are aware, the charivari ritual was performed well before the eighteenth century. If we assume that the word charivari accompanied the practice, then it seems unlikely that the rough music that attended it took hundreds of years to enter the language.

   Incidentally, there may be a genealogical connection between the cultural Phrygianism that this essay describes and the Roman festivities that are believed to have led to medieval Carnival. There may, in other words, be a genetic link between the classical rough music that this essay historicizes and the rough music associated with the European charivari, an acknowledged offshoot of Carnival culture. I will explore this link in a future study.

9. John Gower, Confessio Amantis (London, 1483), quoted here from Bullough, 6:400.

10. Examples from the OED include a ca. 1560-78 spelling of the musical instrument as both viol and viall. During the same time period the word for the glass container was spelled vyol (1550), violl (1609), and viol (1660).

11. Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass, “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text,” SQ 44 (1993): 255-83, esp. 257. About spelling variations in particular they write: “Until dictionaries fixed these boundaries, cognates blurred, phonetically and orthographically, without regard to the post-lexical determinations that subsequently divided them” (266).

12. William A. McIntosh, “Musical Design in Pericles,” English Language Notes 11 (1973): 100-106, esp. 101.

13. See McIntosh, passim; F. D. Hoeniger, “Musical Cures of Melancholy and Mania in Shakespeare,” in Mirror up to Shakespeare: Essays in Honour of G. R. Hibbard, J. C. Gray, ed. (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1984), 55-67; and DelVecchio and Hammond, eds., 71-73.

14. Hoeniger notes that the name appears in Shakespeare's sources and that the two scenes in which Cerimon's appearance is quantitatively significant, 3.2 and 5.3, are “ceremonious scenes” (3).

15. The first scholar to suggest Wilkins as Shakespeare's co-author was H. Dugdale Sykes in Sidelights on Shakespeare ([Stratford-upon-Avon: The Shakespeare Head Press, 1919], 143-204) and, again, briefly in Sidelights on Elizabethan Drama ([Oxford: Oxford UP, 1924], 12). Sykes's argument persuaded Hoeniger, who, in turn, convinced David J. Lake, MacDonald P. Jackson, M. W. A. Smith, and Gary Taylor of the probability of Wilkins's direct involvement. My remarks here cannot do justice to the complexity and sophistication of these scholars' arguments in favor of Wilkins. For an up-to-date review of the evidence, including the pertinent computer-based analyses, readers should consult Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), 556-60; and MacD. P. Jackson, “Rhyming in Pericles: More Evidence of Dual Authorship,” Studies in Bibliography 46 (1993): 239-49, esp. 240n. For summaries of the difficulties (and not just the authorship issue) plaguing the text of Pericles, see Karen Csengeri, “William Shakespeare, Sole Author of Pericles,” English Studies 71 (1990): 230-43, esp. 230-34; and Barbara Mowat, “The Theater and Literary Culture” in A New History of Early English Drama, John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan, eds. (New York: Columbia UP, 1997), 217-30, esp. 218-22.

16. David M. Bergeron, Shakespeare's Romances and the Royal Family (Lawrence: UP of Kansas, 1985), 117.

17. DelVecchio and Hammond, eds., 207. My brief summary of DelVecchio and Hammond's counterarguments cannot represent their full discussion.

18. DelVecchio and Hammond, eds., 11.

19. See, for instance, Constance Jordan, Shakespeare's Monarchies: Ruler and Subject in the Romances (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell UP, 1997), 35-67; and her essay “‘Eating the Mother’: Property and Propriety in Pericles” in Creative Imitation: New Essays on Renaissance Literature in Honor of Thomas M. Greene, David Quint, Margaret W. Ferguson, G. W. Pigman III, and Wayne A. Rebhorn, eds. (Binghamton: State University of New York, 1992), 331-53; Stuart M. Kurland. “‘The care … of subjects' good’: Pericles, James I, and the Neglect of Government,” Comparative Drama 30 (1996): 220-44; and Dana Lloyd Spradley, “Pericles and the Jacobean Family Romance of Union” in Assays: Critical Approaches to Medieval and Renaissance Texts, Peggy A. Knapp and Gary F. Waller, eds., 7 vols. (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon UP, 1992), 7:87-118. Jordan (Shakespeare's Monarchies) and Spradley both note the author issue in passing but decline to incorporate it into their analyses.

20. DelVecchio and Hammond, eds., 12.

21. DelVecchio and Hammond, eds., 209. I tend to agree and would add that Gary Taylor and MacDonald P. Jackson's editorial remarks in the Companion volume show signs of a distinctly circular logic, as when, for instance, our principal reason for suspecting Wilkins's involvement in the first place—Wilkins's novelized version of the play—becomes in their arguments a result of co-authorship, whose “significance” is heightened by the assumption of Wilkins's involvement (557). The Painfull Aduentures is declared to be a “substantive” text to the extent that the editors transfer entire vignettes of action into their version of the play, defending at least one of these transferences on the basis of imagined censorship and announcing that “P. A. gives us, in essence, the more dangerous and more dramatic original” (559). Its amalgamation with Q is said to return Pericles “closer to its state when it left the hands of its author(s)” (559), a statement that seems incautious at the least when removed from the context of Taylor and Jackson's belief in Wilkins's role.

22. See, for example, Jackson, “Rhyming in Pericles,” 239, 246, and 248n.

23. Acts 19:23-27, 28, 34, 35; quotations follow The Geneva Bible: A facsimile of the 1560 edition (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1969). Acts and Paul's letter to the Ephesians are considered to be among Shakespeare's sources for The Comedy of Errors, a play also set in Ephesus and also related to Pericles by its use of Gower's Confessio Amantis.

24. Acts 19:19. For a similar point about the scriptural basis of the occult representation of Ephesus with respect to The Comedy of Errors, see Arthur F. Kinney, “Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors and the Nature of Kinds,” Studies in Philology 85 (1988): 29-52; and Glyn Austen, “Ephesus Restored: Sacramentalism and Redemption in The Comedy of Errors,” Journal of Literature and Theology 1-1 (1987): 54-69.

25. James Mason, The Anatomie of Sorcerie. Wherein the Wicked Impietie of Charmers, Inchanters, and such like, is discouered and confuted (London, 1612), sig. A2^r. Mason explains in his preface “To the Reader” that “It was my chance to fall into communication with a notable supporter of those wicked vanities, which are spoken against in this booke: who not contented to practise the same himselfe, went about to perswade others thereunto. … Which when I heard, and vnderstood, considering that he was a man of place, and some learning, and therefore might preuaile the more in this mischieuous deuise: I determined to search out what authors had written concerning that matter” (sig. A2^r).

26. Mason, sig. M3^v.

27. See Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods, trans. Barbara F. Sessions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1953); and Don Cameron Allen, Mysteriously Meant: The Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical Interpretation in the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1970).

28. In Seznec and Allen's usage the term Oriental refers to West Asia, the Near East, and Egypt, regions I will summarize henceforth as “eastern.”

29. See Walter Burkert, The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age, trans. Margaret E. Pinder and Walter Burkert (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992); Robert Turcan, The Cults of the Roman Empire, trans. Antonia Nevill (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996); Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1996); and M. L. West, The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).

30. See Burkert, 1-8, esp. 1-2.

31. The term manuals is Seznec's; see his chapters “The Science of Mythology in the Sixteenth Century” (219-56) and “The Influence of the Manuals” (279-323).

32. Allen, 233.

33. Seznec, 238; see also 239, 277, 285, and 289-95.

34. See Seznec, 313-15; D. J. Gordon, The Renaissance Imagination, Stephen Orgel, ed. (Berkeley: U of California P, 1975), 102-5, 134, 174-75, and 187-90; and John Peacock, “Ben Jonson's Masques and Italian Culture” in Theatre of the English and Italian Renaissance, J. R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring, eds. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991), 73-94, esp. 76-77.

35. See Bullough, 6:418-19 and 471-74.

36. Margaret Doody makes an interesting case for calling these works “novels” as opposed to “romances” or “fictions,” the generically vague designations that scholars generally use in trying to categorize them. Their status as precursors to medieval and early modern prose fiction—not to mention the eighteenth-century novel itself—is a central tenet of Doody's study.

37. See Doody, 213-50. Shakespeare's familiarity with these narratives has been the subject of at least three book-length studies: Carol Gesner, Shakespeare & the Greek Romance: A Study of Origins (Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1970); Barbara A. Mowat, The Dramaturgy of Shakespeare's Romances (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1976); and J. J. M. Tobin, Shakespeare's Favorite Novel: A Study of The Golden Asse As Prime Source (Lanham, MD: UP of America, 1984). See also Martha L. Adams, “The Greek Romance and William Shakespeare,” Mississippi University Studies in English 8 (1967): 43-52. Mowat's Dramaturgy posits their specific influence on Shakespeare's late plays, the romances and tragicomedies, which, according to Mowat, inherited from ancient fiction the narrative and dramaturgical elements that so markedly distinguish them from his earlier plays. Mowat demonstrates parallels between Shakespeare's late plays and many elements of plot, character, and theme in the ancient novels, which she describes as “complex—indeed contorted—in structure, dependent on surprise, suspense, numerous dei ex machina; filled with dream-visions and oracles and magic; much emphasis on chastity, a miraculous happy ending, and a realization on the part of the characters that they are pawns in the hands of fate” (129). Interestingly, because of its disputed authorship, Mowat declines to discuss Pericles, focusing instead on Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. A willingness, however, to consider the same indebtedness to ancient fiction in Pericles that she finds in the later three plays might further the case for single-authorship by demonstrating Pericles's generic consistency. Peggy Muñoz Simonds takes this view as a critical commonplace, setting the ancient novel among the four “major literary ancestors” of tragicomedy and describing them as “esoteric romances of the Greeks and of the later Latin author Apuleius, all works that contain disguised information on the mystery cults of antiquity” (Myth, Emblem, and Music in Shakespeare's Cymbeline [Newark: U of Delaware P; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1992], 32).

38. Achilles Tatius, Loves of Clitophon and Leucippe (London, 1597).

39. Apuleius, The Golden Ass of Apuleius (1566), trans. William Adlington (New York: Hogarth Press, 1966), 334.

40. The Mother goddesses in these four regions were Demeter, Ishtar/Innana, Astarte, and Isis, respectively. Studies of these and other of the Mothers have proliferated since the early twentieth century, beginning with Robert Briffault's The Mothers: A Study of the Origins of Sentiment and Institutions (3 vols. [New York: Macmillan, 1927]) and including Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1948); Raphael Patai, The Hebrew Goddess, 3^rd enl. ed. (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1990); Marija Gimbutas, The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe 7000-3500 bc (Berkeley: U of California P, 1974); Gerda Lerner, Women and History: Vol. 1, The Creation of Patriarchy (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986), 141-60; and Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image (London: Penguin Books, 1991).

41. Turcan's recent Cults of the Roman Empire takes up the theme of the presence of “Oriental” cults in the West where earlier classicists, such as Franz Cumont, left off. The acknowledged expert on Cybele is Maarten J. Vermaseren, author of Cybele and Attis: The Myth and the Cult (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977).

42. Turcan, 16.

43. Turcan, 18.

44. Turcan, 47, 43, and 48.

45. Turcan, 46. Turcan writes: “Behind a triumphal procession … knights and senators, freedmen and dignitaries could be seen in procession, made up, masked, and clad in the most unexpected disguises. Flute-players, trumpeters, drummers and chanters of the Mother-cult brotherhood … helped to add sound to the masquerade which was followed by lavish feasting” (46).

46. Turcan, 37-38.

47. See Vermaseren, 29, 77, and 110.

48. “‘To rave with the followers of Bacchus’ was synonymous with ‘to be carried away with the Corybants [the Greek name for Cybele's priests]’” (Turcan, 30).

49. See Vermasaren, 23. Scholars of the subject now tend to believe that the name actually refers to the black stone or “cube” that was Cybele's altar fetish, similar to the cubelike black “Ka'aba” stone of Mecca, which was worshiped in the name of a female deity until the advent of Islam. See Turcan, 29; and Baring and Cashford, 396.

50. Clement of Alexandria, quoted here from Vermaseren, 116.

51. Lucretius was rediscovered in the fifteenth century and became known, though not widely, in the sixteenth century. The first English translations of De rerum natura appeared in the second half of the seventeenth century, when interest arose in his atomistic materialism.

52. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things (De rerum natura), ed. and trans. Anthony M. Esolen, (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995), 2:590.

53. Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 3.154-55. Cybele appears occasionally throughout The Aeneid, having provided Aeneas and his followers with lumber from the slopes of Mount Ida to build their ships bound for Italy; and serving, in Book 10, as the “Benignant / Lady of Ida” on whom Aeneas calls to be his “first patroness in combat” (ll. 348-52). Virgil's image of her “Wearing her crown of towers,” riding “By chariot through the towns of Phrygia, / In joy at having given birth to gods” (6.1053-55) was later appropriated by Boccaccio in his Genealogia deorum gentilium libri, which popularized her in early modern Europe as an emblem of empire and civilization. Peter S. Hawkins writes in “From Mythography to Myth-making: Spenser and the Magna Mater Cybele” (The Sixteenth Century Journal 12.3 [1981]: 51-64) that the Virgilian Cybele “capture[d] the imagination of [sixteenth-century] poets,” the “‘Troynovants’” (55), including Spenser, to whom Hawkins's study is principally devoted.

54. Ovid, Fasti, trans. James George Frazer (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1936), 4.183-90.

55. In Augustine's De civitate Dei, see esp. Book 7, 25-26, but comments also appear sporadically throughout Books 1-10.

56. Vincenzo Cartari, The Fovntaine of Ancient Fiction. Wherein is liuely depictured the Images and Statues of the gods and the Ancients, with their proper and perticular expositions, trans. Richard Linche (London, 1599), sig. H4^v.

57. See Hawkins, passim.

58. The classics scholars Karl Kerenyi and Reinhold Merkelbach each published studies earlier this century (Die Griechisch-Orientalische Romanliteratur in religionsgeschichtlicher Beleuchtung [1927] and Roman und Mysterium in der Antike [1962], cited in Doody, 19) that asserted religious origins for the Greek narratives, tracing them to the mysteries of Isis, Dionysus, and Mithras in particular. Doody agrees that the novels “very openly and ostensibly present … the images and practices and rituals of the mystery cults” (161), but she takes issue with the “bias” of Merkelbach, especially toward the rites of the male divinities, pointing out the ubiquity of female deities in these fictions (164).

59. See Walter Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1987), 12-13 and 15.

60. Elsewhere in Shakespeare's works there are references to priests serving Diana; see, for instance, Cymbeline, where Iachimo complains that Imogen's sexual loyalty to Posthumus will leave Iachimo unsatisfied: “Should he make me / Live like Diana's priest betwixt cold sheets … ?” (1.6.133-37). In his note on this line, Bevington simply substitutes “priestess” for “priest,” exemplifying a modern erasure of what Shakespeare apparently knew to be historical.

61. The full oath reads: “Till [Marina] be married, madam, / By bright Diana, whom we honor, all / Unscissored shall this hair of mine remain, / Though I show ill in 't” (3.3.29-32).

62. The second oath is offered secondhand in Gower's lines at 4.4.27-29.

63. See Jordan, “‘Eating the Mother’,” 349.