“TO TEACH THY LOVER, WHAT THY THOUGHTS DESIRE”: MARLOWE’S SPLENDID TRANSLATION OF OVID’S ELEGIES (AMORES), 1630, A CLASSICAL INSPIRATION FOR SHAKESPEARE AND THE ELIZABETHANS

OVID. All Ovid’s Elegies: 3. Bookes. By C[hristopher]. M[arlowe]. Epigrams by [Sir] J[ohn]. Davies]. [London]: Middlebourgh, circa 1630. Small octavo, late 19th-century full crushed dark blue morocco, raised bands. Housed in a custom clamshell box.

Rare unabridged edition, printed circa 1630, of Christopher Marlowe’s lyrical and sensuous translation of Ovid’s Elegies (Amores), a defining influence on Shakespeare, Marlowe and Ben Jonson, this copy handsomely bound in full morocco.

“With their intense interest in classical authors—especially their shared interest in Ovid—Marlowe and Shakespeare” can be said to have closely followed Ovid’s model, a “path that Marlowe begins to traverse and that Shakespeare is left more fully to chart… Like Ovid in the Amores [Elegies], Shakespeare” also explores the evocative tension between “poetry’s power to immortalize and love’s power to produce shame” (Cheney, Shakespeare, 213-14). In Marlowe’s translation of Ovid’s sublime and erotic poetry, “we learn of the intriguing sex life of the narrator, as he moves from his own bedroom to his mistress… in a delicious, witty narrative about the painful joys of sexual betrayal” (Kozuka, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, 186). It has further been said that “if Marlowe saw himself in Ovid, it was because he was sufficiently on top of his training to read Ovid as a master poet—sensuous, cynical and appealing—and not merely because Ovid could be perceived as a martyr to anti-establishment values” (Stephenson, Observer). Marlowe’s initial translation of Ovid dated circa 1593, with Davies’ Epigrams probably written by 1594. Though contemporary allusions exist as early as 1594, Pforzheimer notes that a likely circulation in manuscript makes that date unreliable as a first printing. Given an order by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London to burn copies of editions containing the Elegies and Epigrams in 1599, initial publication is dated between 1594 and 1599. Of six extant undated editions, two were abridged; this is the third of four extremely rare unabridged editions. With the second version of Elegy 15, Book I, “attributed to Ben Jonson as it was afterwards inserted in his Poetaster (1602)” (Pforzheimer 641). Title page with ornamental engraving. Brueggemann, 618. Palmer,76. STC 18933. Hazlitt IV:76. Harris, 110.

Text quite fresh with only lightest foxing. An exceptional copy of this rarity.