Schedule / Horaire
Friday 25 April 2014, 11h-12h30.
Room: L106.
Leaders / Organisateurs
Agnès Lafont, University of Montpellier – Institut d’Etudes sur la Renaissance, L’âge Classique et les Lumières, UMR 5186 (France), and Atsuhiko Hirota, Kyoto University (Japan)
Participants
Chair : Yves Peyré, Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier (France)
- Charlotte Coffin, Université Paris Est Créteil Val de Marne (France)
Where from and where to? Heywood’s appropriation of classical mythology in The Golden Age (1611) - Tania Demetriou, University of York (UK)
The Genre of Myth, or Myth without Ovid? - Atsuhiko Hirota, University of Kyoto (Japan)
Venetian Enchantresses and Egyptian Sorcery: Transformations of the Circean Myth in Othello - Agnès Lafont, Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier (France)
Ovidian emergences in Spenser’s Faery Queen: Britomart and Myrrha, an unexpected textual junction? - Janice Valls-Russell, Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier (France)
Constance and Arthur as Andromache and Astyanax? Trojan Shadows in Shakespeare’s King John
Abstracts / Résumés
1. Charlotte Coffin, Université Paris Est Créteil Val de Marne (France)
Where from and where to? Heywood’s appropriation of classical mythology in The Golden Age (1611)
While the Ages plays are recognized by critics as having played an important part in Heywood’s and the Red Bull’s success in the 1610s, they are seldom analysed in detail. This paper will offer a close reading of The Golden Age and address both its rewriting of (not very) classical sources in dramatic form, and its relationship to non-mythological plays of the same period, like Shakespeare’s tragicomedies. It will also reconsider the structure of the play, which seems based on alternation but reveals a deeper cohesion, with pervasive concerns about succession, transgression, and generation.
2. Tania Demetriou, University of York (UK)
The Genre of Myth, or Myth without Ovid?
This paper will attempt to revisit the classical paradigms that shaped the Elizabethan tradition of poems known as ‘Ovidian’, or ‘mythological epyllia’. In particular I will try to ask what literary influences beyond Ovid energise these poems by exploring certain short mythological poems from antiquity, their early modern afterlife, and their place in the particular process whereby Elizabethan poet-playwrights created their own ‘epyllic’ tradition.
3. Atsuhiko Hirota, University of Kyoto (Japan)
Venetian Enchantresses and Egyptian Sorcery: Transformations of the Circean Myth in Othello
Circe, a goddess and witch with a power to change men into beasts, has been variously reconfigured in the literary tradition since originating in The Odyssey. This paper aims at exploring the crossroads between the tradition of Circean myths and Othello, a play representing the fluidity of identity in the Mediterranean setting and abounding in references to beasts. For this purpose, it focuses on Othello’s tale about his past hardships and his handkerchief, both of which first link Othello to witchcraft but result in suggesting Desdemona’s connection with Circe and her traditional descendants.
4. Agnès Lafont, Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier (France)
Ovidian emergences in Spenser’s Faery Queen: Britomart and Myrrha, an unexpected textual junction?
Both (unexpected) references to incestuous Myrrha (Met.X.311-476) in Spenser’s book III of The Faerie Queene are a symptom of a Virgilian-Ovidian intertextuality which is gradually acknowledged by critics. Britomart as Myrrha (Adonis’ mother turned into a Myrrh-tree) and as Laurel-like Daphne exemplifies what Raphael Lyne calls a ‘complex intertextual junction’ testifying of the poet’s compound engagement with classical tradition; charting these Ovidian subtexts unveils an heterogeneous mode of imitatio, while it also uncovers a deep anxiety about female chastity woven in the texture of an essentially Virgilian epic poem.
5. Janice Valls-Russell, Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier (France)
Constance and Arthur as Andromache and Astyanax? Trojan Shadows in Shakespeare’s King John
This paper seeks to demonstrate that various factors converge in King John to endow setting, rhetoric and characters with a discreet classical dimension, within the context of a play that is a Tudor interpretation of medieval history. Coloured by political and religious contingency, and the Elizabethans’ complex relationship with the medieval past, the play’s tragic overtones also carry traces of a contemporary fascination with the Trojan tradition. Shakespeare’s remodelling of events and his dramatisation of the figures of Constance and Arthur suggest a revisiting of the destruction of Troy and the tragic fates of Andromache and Astyanax.