Cover

Half Title

Title Page

Copyright Page

Table of contents

List of Figures

Notes on contributors

Acknowledgements

A note on the text

Introduction: ‘Ariachne’s broken woof’

Reading and studying mythology: performative rhetoric and ‘a tract of confusion’

Texturing classical mythology, Roman politics and English history

‘Honest thefts’, borrowings, blendings and recursions

Recursive, relocated Troys

Print and stage: growing up together and moving forward

Interweaving processes

Close readings

Notes

1 Shakespeare’s mythological feuilletage: A methodological induction

Notes

2 The non-Ovidian Elizabethan epyllion: Thomas Watson, Christopher Marlowe, Richard Barnfield

Prologue or preludium: Richard Barnfield’s Hellens Rape

Shepherds and lovers: remembering Watson in 1594

The epyllion and its discontents: classical, early modern, Ovidian

Watson, the Greek epyllion, and the prequel

Marlowe’s Hero and Leander: ‘desunt nonnulla’?

Notes

3 ‘This realm is an empire’: Tales of origins in medieval and early modern France and England

Family trees

Mother cities

New scepticism

Shakespeare’s tongues

Notes

4 Trojan shadows in Shakespeare’s King John

Trojan collocations

Constance: sister to Andromache and daughter to Hecuba

Arthur: brother to Astyanax

Notes

5 Venetian Jasons, parti-coloured lambs and a tainted wether: Ovine tropes and the Golden...

Venetian Jasons

The Golden Fleece, Medea and Shylock’s ‘parti-color’d lambs’

The revival of ‘a tainted wether in the flock’

Notes

6 Fifty ways to kill your brother: Medea and the poetics of fratricide in early modern English literature

Sisters and brothers in the ancient and early modern world

The fratricide in Ovid and Seneca

The spectacle of grief

The body in pieces

Notes

7 ‘She, whom Jove transported into Crete’: Europa, between consent and rape

A two-strand tradition of reception

Europa in Elizabethan sonnets: male-centred fantasies and ‘dolefull dreames’

Beatrice and Perdita: reclaiming agency for Europa

Beyond Europa: refashioning borrowings and influences

Notes

8 Subtle weavers, mythological interweavings and feminine political agency...

The mythographical tradition and the re-emergence of the weavers’ political virtue

Internal interweavings: the new Penelopean route to political virtue

External interweavings and resistance to tyranny

Secularising the mythical weaver

Notes

9 Multi-layered conversations in Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage

Arguing over Dido

Coexisting voices in Dido, Queen of Carthage

Notes

10 Burlesque or neoplatonic? Popular or elite?: The shifting value of classical...

Love’s Mistress and French burlesque

Judges, arbiters, critics

Generic interweavings

Notes

11 Pygmalion, once and future myth: Instead of a conclusion

Measure for Measure, III.ii

Reading’s histories

Playing with Ovid

Scholarship as fantasy

Pygmalions

Absences

Coda: modern Pygmalions for what?

Notes

Select bibliography

Primary sources

Secondary sources

Index