SOURCE: “From ‘Speechless Dialect’ to ‘Prosperous Art’: Shakespeare's Recasting of the Pygmalion Image,” in Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 3, Summer, 1985, pp. 285-95.

[In the following essay, Rico follows Shakespeare's treatment of the Pygmalion myth in his dramas The Taming of the Shrew, Measure for Measure, and The Winter's Tale.]

                                                  Oh, she's warm!
If this be magic, let it be an art
Lawful as eating.

The Winter's Tale, V.iii, 109-111¹

In The Winter's Tale, Hermione, long thought dead, comes down from her platform, a living woman walking among us. In presenting this scene, Shakespeare not only gives new life to Greene's pedestrian Pandosto; he also restores to greatness the Pygmalion myth itself. By Shakespeare's time, this myth was clearly in need of such restoration; for the narrative which might seem the perfect celebration of the artist's power to move an audience had itself become sullied, first by medieval commentators and then by the Elizabethans themselves.² During much of the Renaissance the Pygmalion myth seemed to offer less a portrait of the artist than a warning about the power of women and of art. And if the Elizabethan John Marston made Pygmalion into a doting and foolish lover, the minor characters in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure remind us that Pygmalion's statue had become by then an emblem for a whore.³ In this paper I would like first to outline the deterioration of the Pygmalion image; then by examining three Shakespearean plays, I would like to show how Shakespearean drama treats the myth, comes to terms with its power and its unseemliness, and alters the connotation that it held.

To illustrate this, I would first like to return for a moment to Book X of Ovid's Metamorphoses, traditionally acknowledged to be the narrative's source. (The Ovidian text was itself an act of recovery; for as Brooks Otis notes, Ovid's version was actually a recasting of a more sensationalist story in Philostephanus' Kypriaka, an ancient collection of erotic tales.)⁴ The Ovidian narrative depicts the transformation of both the ivory image and the artist, and a temporary recovery of the society that contains them. It seems to contain four sections: the artist's sculpting his image, his praise of her, his prayer to Venus, and his witnessing the transformation itself. In Ovid's text, each of these sections is important; one often serves to comment on or to correct the excesses of the scene before it.

In the first scene, Pygmalion rejects the affection of the Propoetides and sculpts for himself an ivory image of a young girl. In contrast to the Propoetides, hardened into prostitution and then into stone, the ivory image is likened to snow: an analogy which both reflects the figure's purity and anticipates its moment of transformation, the moment of melting and softening.⁵ Even in Ovid's version, the threat of narcissism is never absent; for in the second scene the artist calls on his imagination to supply the satisfaction that the image cannot offer. Yet in contrast to later versions, Ovid's narrative offers the more public prayer to Venus as a corrective to Pygmalion's isolated adoration of the ivory image which is his own work. Here Pygmalion's ritual is answered, not simply by his imagination, but by Venus' bright flames; through Venus' intervention, the image itself, first compared to whitest snow, now likened to Hymettian wax, softens in his hands. The public context that surrounds the last scene also helps to diminish the threat of Narcissus; for in praying “to have as wife … one like [his] ivory maid,” Pygmalion requests not simply an end to his frustrations but rather a return to an earlier state, the recovery of an earlier society when men relied on women, not on images of their own making, for their satisfaction. Ovid's narrative ends, not only with the consummation of love, but with the birth of Paphos and the temporary recovery of the Cyprian land.

In one sense the Pygmalion myth would seem to embody the ideal of Renaissance poetics, dramatizing both the artist's wish to move his audience and his desire to create a world more perfect than Nature's own.⁶ Although a few writers, Petrarch among them, try to adapt the image, many more writers and artists concerned with the concept of liveliness preferred to allude to the myth only cryptically, or in the most general of terms.⁷ Indeed by the Renaissance, the Pygmalion story had become a myth alluded to often, but seldom called by its own name. Although there had been many medieval pictorial representations of the myth, there were few Renaissance images of it. Bronzino's Mannerist painting is one of the few exceptions.⁸ The myth is neglected by Comes, Cartari, Giraldi; and even as the blason flourished, the Pygmalion myth appeared only rarely in the works of the Pleiade.⁹

During the Middle Ages, of course, many classical myths underwent what Panofsky has called a “disjunction,” a reinterpretation within a nonclassical context. For the Pygmalion myth, such alteration might be called extreme; for as Rosamund Tuve suggests, the myth had become “as much as a cliché as that of Narcissus for idolatrous self love.”¹⁰

During must of the Renaissance the Pygmalion myth remained darkened by its medieval precursors, tales of seduction and idolatry, allegories about the threat of women and of art. Clement of Alexandria warned of the myth's “lewdness” and “perversion,” and Arnauf of Orleans warned about its necromantic idolatry. Such warnings emerged not only in the moralized versions of Ovid's text (Pierre Bersuire's Ovid moralizatus), but also in Jean de Meun's version of the Roman de la rose, which treats Pygmalion as a doting fool. And even Boccaccio's protohumanist celebration of the classics, the Genealogia deorum, conceded that the myth was either an allegory about artistic genius or the study of a lovelorn old man.¹¹ Similarily, Castiglione's Cortegiano first uses the Pygmalion figure to “fashion” a gentlewoman, but later recommends that the same woman avoid the advances of Pygmalion by retaining “cold quietness,” and the “steady virtue of silence.”¹²

In Elizabethan England, the general enthusiasm for Ovidian texts did not seem to improve the status of Pygmalion, but the Elizabethan rediscovery of Ovid presented new opportunities to examine the myth. As Elizabeth Story Donno and Clark Hulse have shown, the period from 1560-1598 included the publication of not only Golding's translation (1560), but also a series of minor epics based on Ovidian texts.¹³ Despite the Elizabethan interest in other Ovidian narratives, the idealism offered by the Pygmalion myth was still overshadowed by the moral threat it seemed to contain. Indeed the unseemliness already coloring the myth only became more pronounced. Samuel Daniel might have used Pygmalion in a single poem,¹⁴ but George Pettie's tract, “Pygmalion's Image and His Friend,” made the Ovidian narrative into a scaffold for misogynist flyting and adulterous tales. “May one gather grapes of thorns, sugar of thistles, or constancy of women? Nay, if a man sift the whole sex thoroughly, he shall find their words to be but wind, their faith forgery, and their deeds dissembling.”¹⁵ And John Marston's “Metamorphosis of Pygmalion's Image,” while ostensibly satirizing the overly-fond Petrarchan lover, made Pygmalion's image and the artist himself into a perverse couple indeed.¹⁶ All this at a time when Elizabethan society was asked to celebrate the Queen's celibacy. As she herself proclaimed: “a marble stone shall declare that a queen having reigned such a time lived and died a virgin.”¹⁷

The Pygmalion theme seems present in much of Shakespeare's work. We can find its intertwining of sexual and artistic concerns in the Sonnets and in Prospero's need to establish distance from his creation. In this paper I have chosen to examine the theme in three plays: The Taming of the Shrew, Measure for Measure, and The Winter's Tale. If both The Shrew's main plot and its dramatic frame show how the artist can refashion his subject, Measure for Measure's multiple plots subsume Marston's Pygmalion-grotesquerie and fashion from it a narrative about the seductive power of pure language and honorable intent. The Winter's Tale answers Pettie's misogynist flyting and adulterous accusations and helps to restore the Pygmalion myth itself.

Shakespeare's use of the Pygmalion myth seems both to reflect and to challenge Elizabethan distaste for the image. In The Taming of the Shrew, for example, he uses the myth to expose and to examine the issue of artistic control in its public and private forms. The public idea of Pygmalionism, given voice in Castiglione's Cortegiano, reemerges in Baptista's educational program for his daughters. (As the play's comedy reveals, however, such a process is always vulnerable to the intrusion of imposters.) More often in the play, of course, art takes the form not of “fashioning” but of feigning and disguise. While Pygmalion carves and pampers his image, Petruchio asserts control over Kate, until she is carved and molded into shape. Whereas Pygmalion delights in dressing his statue, Petruchio rejects each of Kate's costumes. Converted, Katherine uses her last speech to act out the melting and softening Ovid's narrative describes:

Why are our bodies soft and weak and smooth,
Unapt to toil and trouble in the world,
But that our soft conditions and our hearts
Should well agree with our external parts?

(V.ii.165-168)¹⁸

This passage suggests that the lady has indeed been won over.

In the play's dramatic frame, the Lord's duplicitous victory over Christopher Sly at once reinforces and challenges the main plot's treatment of artistic control. Whereas the converted Christopher Sly is rendered powerless in his new role, Katherine continues to exert her influence, even as she claims to have been converted. If she is transformed, she is also capable of transforming others. Katherine's advice to her female audience, her plea for softness and acquiescence, actually softens and converts her other audience, the formerly cruel Petruchio.¹⁹ When he takes Kate into his arms, he shows that she too has triumphed; for he is lord of “cold comfort” no more (V.i.181).

We can see the myth's intertwining of art, sexuality, and power become even more problematic in Measure for Measure. It is of course this play, and not The Winter's Tale, that contains the poet's only direct reference to the Pygmalion myth. Like Marston, Shakespeare uses the term to suggest a harlot. For as Lucio asks Pompey:

What is there none of Pygmalion's images,
Newly made woman, to be had now?

(III.ii.45)

This image, which connects Shakespeare's Vienna with the land of the Propoetides described in Ovid, is only one in a network of such images pervading the play. As we soon discover, the myth's more troubling aspects are figured forth, not in the subplot of painting and whoring, but in the larger plot's examination of sexual and artistic control. Much of the play's imagery—its images of carving, sculpting, and engraving—provides an opportunity for misogynistic observation and commentary. Even Isabella is left to exclaim: “We are as soft as our complexions / And credulous to false prints” (II.iv.128-129). The issue emerges even more forcefully in the intrigue of the play's major characters: the ritual of exchange where each player assumes the roles of both the hardened image and the artist attempting to soften it. Finally it emerges most problematically in the machinations of the Duke himself, the play's supreme Pygmalion figure, who “frames” a maiden and a plan to restore his kingdom (III.i.260). And in so doing he comes to embody the more threatening aspects of the Pygmalion myth itself.

The play's major characters assume roles of the hardened image and the artist attempting to soften it. Isabella, advertising her own “cold chastity,” rejects Claudio's attempts to convince her of her duty to him. Angelo becomes known for his coldness, his firm resolve, his unwillingness to be moved: he “scarce confesses that his blood flows or his appetite is more to bread than stone” (I.iv.50-52). His blood is “snow-broth”; he “never feels the wanton stings and motions of the sense” (I.iv.57-59). The play does not endorse such “coldness,” for if such immobility is an asset to a kingdom in need of strong correctives, it can also become a serious defect in more private affairs. Indeed Angelo's “coldness” is revealed to be not simply fairness of firm resolve, but a refusal to show compassion or to acknowledge his own fault. Such imagery describes Angelo's rejection of Mariana: whatever her appeals, he is “a marble to her tears” (III.i.233).

In the play's ritual of exchange, Angelo assumes the role not only of the hardened image but also of Pygmalion himself; for, just as Pygmalion found the Propoetides easy to resist but a purer image fully seductive, Angelo acknowledges:

Never could the strumpet
With all her double vigor, art and nature
Once stir my temper
But the virtuous maid subdues me quite.

(II.iii.182-185)

Angelo's wooing, of course, differs from Pygmalion's; whereas Pygmalion relied on soft words, small gifts, and songs to woo his beloved, Angelo more violently attempts to erode Isabella's resolve: “Fit thy consent to my sharp appetite” (II.iv.161). But whereas Pygmalion's consummated affair gave birth to a new child and the temporary recovery of the Cyprian state, Angelo's is “made dull,” by his evening's pleasure. Unlike Pygmalion, he is not transformed: “This deed unshapes me quite, makes me unpregnant. And dull to all proceedings” (IV.iv.22-24).

Just as Katherine attempts to soften the stern Petruchio, Isabella stands, a chaste maiden, about to enter the convent but asking pardon for her brother who has violated chastity. A pure maiden, she attempts, for her brother's sake, to “soften” Angelo (I.iv.68-70). Lucio's advice to her, “You are too cold,” and “Touch him,” underscores the relationship between artistic success and sexual conquest (II.ii.45,70). What such attempts achieve, however, is not a softening or a greater compassion, but merely the awakening of an appetite.

Angelo himself perceives that for all her artistry Isabella is “but an instrument of some more mightier member” (V.i.237). Indeed, the play's most successful but most problematic Pygmalion is of course the Duke himself.²⁰ Like Pygmalion, the Duke becomes disgusted with his own society, and he withdraws from it. He creates Angelo, lends him “terror” and dresses him with “love,” and then wanders in disguise to evaluate the creature's performance (indeed to wonder at his transformation). He then “frames” a “maid” to make her fit for the performance, another illusion of his own (III.i.260). Like Pygmalion's image, this plan “will grow to a most prosperous perfection” (III.i.265). The Duke's art leaves Angelo exposed, Isabella vindicated, Claudio brought back from the dead, and Mariana standing “a marble monument” to her own constancy (V.i.233).

As a result of the Duke's appeals, Isabella casts off her former coldness; as a result of his duplicity, the play can offer a restored community and a sense of dramatic closure. Such an ending is achieved, however, not without residual questions. The Duke's magic treats persons not as persons but as creations, to be “framed” as desire dictates. By the play's end, the Duke's power, like that of Angelo, becomes something to be feared.

It is not until The Winter's Tale that the myth's most threatening aspects are treated and transformed. The final scene, which brings together poetry, art, and music, has already received the critics' generous attention.²¹ Recently, Ewbank has shown how Shakespeare introduced statues to the Jacobean stage. Richard Studing has shown how Shakespeare adapted the conventions of masque and royal pageantry to form “one sweeping breathless moment,” and using the Pygmalion myth Leonard Barkan has offered a way of interpreting the play's troubling reference to Giulio Romano. Barkan suggests that the description in Vasari's text provided the artist a privileged position: as sculptor, painter, and architect, Romano came to embody “the multiplicity of arts, the paragone of art and nature.” Barkan concludes his essay by suggesting that whatever threat of idolatry Romano's image contained had to be “balanced” against this “paragone” and the loving faith which brought the image into being.²²

I would like to suggest that the Pygmalion motif Barkan so elegantly describes extends further into the play itself, and further into the tradition of Ovidian narration and commentary. Like Measure for Measure and The Taming of the Shrew, The Winter's Tale seems to feature an intertwining of sexual and artistic concerns. Here, too, the Pygmalion ritual is repeated, with different characters assuming the roles of the hardened image and of artist. If initially the coldness of the Pygmalion image figures forth both Polixenes' resolution and Leontes' “unmoved,” jealous state, the image eventually comes to embody the constancy of Hermione herself. In the final scene the ritual of Pygmalion emerges in language and in art, as Paulina's words and Hermione's living image silence critics' skepticism and restore to wholesomeness the Pygmalion myth itself.

The play's second scene gives new life to the Pygmalion ritual by resurrecting a scene from Measure for Measure. Like Isabella, Hermione attempts to act as advocate, softening Polixenes' stubborn resolve. Standing as critic of her performance, of course, is not the indifferent Lucio, but Hermione's own husband (I.ii.28). At last Hermione does succeed in convincing Polixenes to stay with them; yet her success with persuasion is interpreted as a sign of the other's sexual triumph. Whereas Lucio once chanted, “Touch him,” Leontes concludes that she must have been “touched … forbiddenly” (II.ii.417).

Looking back on his own jealousy, Leontes expects the stone to “chide” him “for being more stone than it” (V.iii.36-38). Throughout the play's second act, the imagery of hardness and coldness refers as much to Leontes' jealousy as to Hermione's constancy. Just as Isabella's chastity and Claudio's fate depend on the Duke's “framing” a maiden, this community's recovery depends on a “design” that Paulina and Hermione have “hammered of” (II.ii.48).

The centerpiece of the plan, is of course, the statue that comes to life. In contrast to earlier images, the hardness expected from this image reminds the viewers of both Hermione's constancy and Leontes' refusal to acknowledge it, his unwillingness to be “softened.” Yet for all its perceived stoniness, this image can itself soften, or bring to stony admiration, whoever beholds its. As Leontes exclaims,

There's magic in thy majesty, which has
My evils conjured to remembrance, and
From thy admiring daughter took the spirits,
Standing like stone with thee.

(V.iii.39-42)

In the play's last scene, however, Paulina's mediation prevents the Pygmalion ritual from taking on the idolatrous or unseemly aspect that it earlier assumed. Here, as in Ovid's narrative, the statue is kept apart, without equal in the gallery; yet whereas Ovid's medieval commentators treated the moment of devotion as something secluded, idolatrous, and even perverse, Paulina's mediation reminds the participants of the ritual's public nature. Whereas the isolated artist could only imagine or simulate the statue's movement, the onlookers at Paulina's ceremony need only “awake [their] faith” (V.iii.95). Medieval versions often mocked Pygmalion's overly devout attention to the image he adored; Leontes' order, “Let no man mock me,” at once calls to mind but also silences all such remarks (V.iii.78). What was once comic or perverse has now been recovered as a genuinely dramatic moment. If commenting on the audience's reaction renders the moment theatrical, it is only in the most powerful sense. In so doing, it celebrates the myth's potential: to engage, even to capture, its audience. The added music, once thought to encourage idolatry, now helps to celebrate the restoration of the image and the conversion of the audience.

If Ovid's narrative offers us the temporary recovery of the Cyprian land, the ending of The Winter's Tale helps to restore Leontes' kingdom and provide for his succession. When Hermione, long thought dead, comes down from the platform, Pettie's misogynist comments are answered. It has been suggested that statues became more commonplace on the English stage after The Winter's Tale.²³ Perhaps the play's final scene of revivification and forgiveness helped not only to return Hermione to a kingdom that once spurned her but also to restore the Pygmalion image from a banishment of its own.

Notes

1. All citations to this play are from The Winter's Tale, ed. J.H.P. Pafford, New Arden Shakespeare (London, 1965).

2. I have found several studies especially helpful in outlining the myth's development. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (London, 1966), 93-94, mentions allusions to the Pygmalion myth in the Renaissance. (Interestingly, few such allusions employ the name “Pygmalion” itself). Mary E. Hazard, “The Anatomy of ‘Liveliness’ as a Concept in Renaissance Aesthetics,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 33 (1974): 407-418 describes the idea of “liveliness” as it was used by Renaissance artists, theorists, and poets. David J.D. Cast, The Calumny of Apelles: A Study of the Humanist Tradition (New Haven, 1981), describes Renaissance methods of comparing painting to poetry, and outlines the humanists' use of rhetorical categories in characterizing a work's effect on the viewer. Vicenzo Cilento, “Pygmalion ovvero la statua vivente,” in Un Augurio a Faffaele Mattiolo (Firenze, 1970), 313-342, discusses the myth's philosophical implications for classical, Renaissance, and modern audiences.

   The medieval recasting of the Pygmalion myth is discussed in F. Ghisalberti, “Medieval Biographies of Ovid,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 9 (1941): 18ff; Rosamund Tuve, Allegorical Images: Some Medieval Books and Their Posterity (Princeton, 1966), 262-264; D. W. Robertson, A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives (Princeton, 1969), 99-102; Thomas D. Hill, “Narcissus, Pygmalion, and the Castration of Saturn: Two Mythological Themes in the Roman de la rose,” Studies in Philology, 71 (1974): 404-426, disputes Robertson's claims that the Pygmalion figure represented idolatrous self-love. For an examination of medieval illustrations of the myth, see Virginia Wylie Egbert, “Pygmalion as Sculptor,” Princeton University Library Chronicle, 28 (1966): 20-33, and the illustrations from the Roman de la rose printed in Fritz Saxl, Verzeichnis astrologischer und mythologischer illustrierter Handschriften des lateinischen Mittelalters (London: Warburg Institute, 1953), III,ii:128-140.

   In examining the Elizabethan interest in Ovidian narrative, I have found two texts especially helpful: Elizabeth Story Donno, Elizabethan Minor Epic (London, 1963), 3-18; Clark Hulse, Metamorphic Verse: The Elizabethan Minor Epic (Princeton, 1981). On Shakespeare's use of the image, see especially Leonard Barkan, “‘Living Sculptures’: Ovid, Michelangelo, and The Winter's Tale,” ELH, 48 (1981): 639-667.

3. John Marston, “The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion's Image,” in Donno, Elizabethan Minor Epic, 247; Philip J. Finkelpearl, “From Petrarch to Ovid: Metamorphoses in John Marston's Metamorphosis of Pygmalion's Image,” ELH, 32 (1965): 133-148; William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, III.ii.45, in the New Arden Shakespeare text, ed. J. W. Lever (London, 1965). All citations to the play are from this edition.

4. Brooks Otis, Ovid as an Epic Poet (Cambridge, 1970), 37.

5. Ovid, Metamorphoses, x: 247-249:

   Interea niveum mira feliciter arte
   sculpsit ebur fornamque dedit, qua femina nasci
   nula potest, operisque sui concepit amorem.

   (“Meanwhile, with wondrous art he successfully carves a figure out of snowy ivory, giving it a beauty more perfect than that of any woman born”), trans. Frank Justus Miller, (Cambridge, 1966), 82-83.

6. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 93: “The artist does not aim at creating a likeness but at rivalling creation itself.”

7. Francesco Petrarca, Rime 78, lines 12-14:

   Pigmaliòn, quanto lodar ti dei
   de l'imagine tua, se mille volte
   n'avesti quel ch'i'sol una vorrei.

   (“Pygmalion how glad you should be of your statue, since you received a thousand times what I yearn to have just once”), trans. Robert Durling, Petrarch's Lyric Poems, (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), 178-179.

   Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 93-94, quotes from a less direct allusion to the theme in Leonardo da Vinci's work: “If the painter wants to see beauties to fall in love with, it is in his power to bring them forth.” Barkan, “‘Living Sculptures,’” 649, identifies “an implicit reference to [Michelangelo] as Pygmalion” in Michelangelo's Rime V. Very often in Michelangelo's work, however, the self-conscious artist's figures embody, not the artist's triumph over material (as the Pygmalion myth suggests), but a more sustained struggle whose outcome is less favorable. One need only think of the flayed skin of St. Bartholomew with which Michelangelo represents the artist in The Last Judgement, or the artist being overcome by his own creation in The Victory.

8. For medieval illustrations of the myth, particularly in the Roman de la rose, see Saxl's Verzeichnis astrologischer …, III,ii: plates L-III; V. W. E. Egbert, “Pygmalion as Sculptor,” 20-33; John Fleming, The Roman de la rose: A Study in Allegory and Iconography (Princeton, 1966), 91-92. J. L. Carr, “Pygmalion and the Philosophes,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 23 (1960): 239-255, notes Bronzino's illustration of the myth.

9. Constance Jordan, “Montaigne's Pygmalion: The Divine Work of Art in ‘De l'affection des peres aux enfans,’” Sixteenth Century Journal, 9-10 (1978): 10, notes that the myth is absent from these sources; I have found the myth also absent from Alciati's Emblemata (Antwerp, 1577), Conti's Mythologia (Venice, 1568), and from Abraham Fraunce's Countess of Pembroke's Ivychurch (London, 1592). G. Demerson, La mythlogie dans l'oeuvre de la Pleiade (Geneva, 1972), 140, asserts that the Pygmalion story is found only rarely in the works of the Pleiade poets.

10. Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascenses in Western Art, (New York, 1974), 84-87; Tuve, Allegorical Imagery, 262.

11. Clement and Arnauf's warnings are discussed in D.W. Robertson, Preface to Chaucer, 99; Tuve, Allegorical Imagery, 262; and Egbert, “Pygmalion as Sculptor,” 30. Both the anonymous Ovide moralisé and Pierre Bersuire's Ovidius moralizatus offer expanded descriptions of Pygmalion's devotion to the statue. Ovidius moralizatus is the title used in a 1933 edition of the text (Moraliter) assigned to Thomas de Walleis, though it is “probably” by Bersuire. While Bersuire judges the character quite sternly, the Ovide moralisé has been considered more playful in its scolding. Hill, “Narcissus, Pygmalion, and the Castration of Saturn,” and others, have stressed the humorous tone of both the Ovide moralisé and Jean's Roman, which is thought to have been influenced by it. It was not until the late fifteenth century that Raphael Regius' edition of the Metamorphoses presented a more “humanist Ovid.” Not until Ludovico Dolce's translation, Le trazformazioni (1553) was the tale's special delicacy actually celebrated.

12. Baldassare Castiglione, Il Libro del cortegiano, “The Courtier,” trans. Thomas Hoby, in Three Renaissance Classics, ed. Burton A. Mulligan (New York, 1953), 454-455, 468.

13. Donno, Elizabethan Minor Epic, 3-18; Hulse, Metamorphic Verse, 244.

14. Samuel Daniel, “Delia,” XIII, quoted in Barkan, “Living Sculptures,” 660.

15. George Pettie, “Pygmalion's Image and His Friend,” A Petite Pallace of Pettie his Pleasure, ed. H. Hartman (Oxford, 1938), 113.

16. Marston, “Metamorphosis,” in Donno, Elizabethan Minor Epic, 247.

17. J. E. Neale, Queen Elizabeth I: A Biography, (Garden City, New Jersey, 1957), 74. On the notion of the queen's celibacy, see also Louis Adrian Montrose, “‘Shaping Fantasies’: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture,” Representations, 1 (1983): 61-87.

18. The citations are from The Taming of the Shrew, ed. Brian Morris, New Arden Shakespeare, (London, 1981).

19. I am grateful to Professor Maureen Quilligan of the University of Pennsylvania for first suggesting this point to me.

20. On the more problematic aspects of artistic control, see especially Leonard Tennehouse, “Representing Power: Measure for Measure in its Time,” Genre, 15 (1982): 139-156; Susan Moore, “Virtue and Power in Measure for Measure,” English Studies, 4 (1982): 308-317; David Sundelson, “Misogyny and Rule in Measure for Measure,” Women's Studies, 9 (1981): 83-91.

21. Inga-Stina Ewbank, “The Triumph of Time in The Winter's Tale,” Review of English Literature 5 (1964): 91; Richard Studing, “Spectacle and Masque in ‘The Winter's Tale,’” English Miscellany: A Symposium of History, Literature and the Arts, 21 (1970): 55-80; Mueller, “Hermione's Wrinkles, or Ovid Transformed: An Essay on The Winter's Tale,” Comparative Drama, 5 (1971): 226-239.

22. Barkan, “‘Living Sculptures,’” 657.

23. Ewbank, “The Triumph of Time,” 98; Studing, “Spectacle and Masque,” 77.