Book Review: MEGA-META-VERSE • Shake-Speare’s blog

1 September 2024

· The review that wouldn’t fit in the SOF newsletter ·

Dr Christian Taylor —English teacher, poetry scholar, anti-Stratfordian (though by no means pledged to me), and co-host of the Much Ado About the AQ podcast— read my Ovid book, and wrote about it.

Viewed one way: Dr Taylor composed a considered, detailed analysis of my 600-page work of poetic adaptation, annotation, and personal backstory.

Viewed another way: CJ got off the leash. Leave it to an English Litter to not know how to count. But hounds of his breed benefit from a good run now and then, so here’s the entire report. If brevity is the soul of your wit, the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship’s Summer 2024 newsletter has the (much) abridged version. Details follow, way down at the bottom.

An item of nomenclatura: the name Ned Devere refers to me as I write now, in the present. The name Edward de Vere refers to me back in the day.

MEGA-META-VERSE

by Dr CJ Taylor
A review of
METAMETAMORPHOSES by Ned Devere
Good Name Press, 2024

Caveat Lector: this review contains a revelation. If you want to save the revelation until you read Devere’s book for yourself, stop before section III.

I had thought my Lord of Oxenford dead.

Some time ago, casually surfing Xthe platform formerly known as Twi… oh, you know and studiously avoiding the noisome piles of Strat-propaganda to be found in such tiresome profusion, I happened upon a post by one Ned Devere.

None other than.

Intrigued, I clicked on the profile picture and went off into a labyrinthine world of posts, links and comments (for the most part very old) that made it clear that my Lord did not die, as widely (or rather not) reported in 1604, but was in fact still in corpore sano and squibbing periodically on Musk’s pariah platform. How à propos.

By a series of twists and turns owing no doubt to the semi-popularity of Much Ado About the AQdetails follow the post, my podcast venture with a friend aiming to demystify the complexities of the AQ for the interested layperson, Ned Devere reached out, in the parlance, to ask if I would kindly take a look at METAMETAMORPHOSES. I said I would.

Would I review said tome? I said I would.

Would Ned send a copy on to me? He said he would.

What follows is a very briefNed: that’s what he wrote, gently-dip-but-not-too-deep aperçu of Milord’s literary efforts, harking back to posts I made on X, and focusing on the reader’s first glimpse of what turns out to be a proper beast: at 554 pagesNed: plus around forty more at the front, numbered separately, this is no book at bedtime. It is, par contre, a serious scholarly reworking of the 1567 Golding translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Be it duly noted. Onwards.

Before the Fifteen Books of Publius Ovidius Naso called Ovid can be enjoyed, one has to wade through the windy, self-opinionated bloviating of Arthur Golding – maternal uncle to de Vere and, per Ned’s tart observation in his little Ante Arturus, ‘an insufferable prig’. So he proves to be.

As a Puritan, Golding is very much given to reworking, or even metamorphosing, Ovid such that the poet shapeshifts from a degenerate heathen celebrating the carnal joys of the classical world of nature and the pulsing pagan pantheon of Jove, Diana, Niobe, Apollo et al to a Christian avant la lettre – inspired by the Godhead to sing his pagan hymns in sympathy with, or even inspired by, the moral and theological landscape of the Old Testament.

As I noted on X,

Golding’s Epistle is a statement of desperate faith. He must prove that Ovid, although a degenerate pagan polytheistic heathen, was actually inspired by Almighty God when he wrote.

and

Golding shoehorns Ovid’s masterful poems into the cake tin of Biblical conformism [such that] everything Ovid writes is made to reflect the pattern of Biblical narrative [even though this] is to wildly and anachronistically interpret Ovid.

As evidence of Golding’s propensity to Christianise Ovid’s lascivious and unashamedly libidinal text, witness one of his many preposterous claims that Ovid was ‘a good heathen’ (you know, one of us):

What man is he but would suppose the author of this book
The first foundation of his work from Moses’s [sic] writings took?

This is arrant piffle, not only because the claim is untestable, but also because it commits the basic Mosaic fallacy, assuming Moses to have been sole author of the Pentateuch. But we cannot pursue any serious Biblical exegesis here.

Golding signs off his cant-ankerous Puritanical throat clearing with such admonishments as

Of this I am right well assured there is no Christian wight
Who can by foolishness so far seduced be from the right

JFNims 1965 softcover Ovid MM — hardly enticing the hapless reader to carry on reading, although, as Devere points out, Uncle Arthur’s finger-wagging epistles were at one point situated after the text of the Metamorphoses (John Frederick Nims consigned them to this post-scriptum fate in his 1965 edition of the text), meaning that one could, reading that edition, have forgone their stern moral injunctions and pompous wind-baggery had one so desired. Now reinstated by Devere to their original, introductory, position, they serve more as a ludic amuse-gueule before the lush Ovidian luxury of Ned’s subsequent translation, which opens

Of shapes transformed to bodies strange I purpose to entreat,
You Gods, consent (for you are they who wrought this wondrous feat)
To further this my enterprise. And from the world begun,
Grant that my verse may to my time its course directly run

— gloriously mellifluous fourteeners whose iambic flow contrasts with Golding’s we are endowed with reason and discretion from on high, and other examples of his far more jabbing, staccato rhythm in the opening epistles: De DUM de DUM de DUM de DUM de DUM de DUM de DUM!

Before further assessing Ned’s translatory powers (or those of his Muse), it seems fair to consider two other versions of Ovid’s original text: one a more historically proximate benchmark, that of A. D. Melville in the Oxford World’s Classics version (1986), and, more remotely but obviously more stylistically relevant, that of Uncle Arthur himself. Melville first.

Although impossible to assess fairly Melville’s methodological and stylistic approach to any satisfying extent in so reduced a spaceNed: I’ll give CJ a pass this time. He was writing for a printed newsletter, not a vertically infinite web page. Not that it got him home before dark., let us consider his opening lines as, however imperfectly, representative of his vox poetica:

Of bodies changed to other forms I tell;
You Gods, who have yourselves wrought every change,
Inspire my enterprise and lead my lay
In one continuous song from nature’s first
Remote beginnings to our modern times

Immediately apparent here are two things: one, the use of blank verse whose metrical regularity is somewhat but not entirely relieved by the enjambment; two, that rather lofty, portentous, grandiloquent style. How might we term it? Golding-⁠esque?

Let us see. Arthur next.

Of shapes transformde to bodies straunge, I purpose to entreate,
Ye gods vouchsafe (for you are they ywrought this wondrous feate)
To further this mine enterprise. And from the world begunne,
Graunt that my verse may to my time, his course directly runne

No need to modernise, as it is assumed that Golding’s language would match that of his historical moment, as does Melville’s. Yet both translators effect a strikingly similar pose: that of the donnish, sonorous technician, dutifully reaching for Ovid on his high place on the shelf y-⁠⁠marked CULTURE, fetching it down for perusal by lesser wights who may well have small Latine, and lesse Greeke. The master craftsman in complete control.

Melville himself, in his translator’s note to the Oxford edition, acknowledges his indebtedness to his predecessors, noting Golding, Sandys,CJT: I make energetic and exorbitant use of the Oxford comma. Pun intended. and Watts as his models, and commenting particularly on Uncle Arthur’s work in these disparaging terms:

[T]he rambling ‘fourteeners’ of Golding, which Shakespeare knew and Pound over-praised, distort the effect of Ovid’s swift and elegant hexameters, but have a clumsy charm of their ownCJT: Melville, in Ovid – Metamorphoses (Oxford: OUP, 1986), p. xxx..

This is an interesting comment, indeed an ironic one, given Melville’s own predilection for a moderately rambling style: sure, he may have jettisoned some of Arthur’s ponderous Puritanical posturing, but his own style is still very solemn and serious.

But soft.

In Devere’s hands, gone is the rambling and clumsy phonology of Golding, and also the mystical wooshiness of Melville with his fondness for constructions such as ere, naught, and scarce. In their place, we enter a poetic medium of deftly controlled elegance, videlicet:

Before the sea and land were made, and heaven’s cover wide,
In all the world one single face of Nature did abide [Book 1]

[…]

Now when she saw Narcissus stray about the forest wide
Her blood ran warm, and step for step fast after him she hied [Book 3]

Placed alongside Melville and Golding, we can discern immediately the change in lexical and phonological style – away from heavily accented iambs and intrusive archaisms, towards a lighter, tripping, allegro style, as part of which, or even hidden within which, the iambic rhythm is more of a thread, less of an iron cable. Words are deftly positioned and settled next to one another, rather than being lashed and cemented into place. So yes, Devere’s translation, for my money, certainly supersedes those of his predecessors, and this is a clever trick to pull off when one considers that his is not intended as a novel or originalworking directly from Ovid’s Latin translation, but as a sprucing up, a modernisation and reclamation of Golding’s: I’ve revised the 1567 text to make it easier to read and enjoy, he says in his prologue. Has he? I think so, yes. Most definitely.

Now, so as not to be accused of partiality, or of an unseemly superfluity of praise, I am happy to point out minor defects in Devere’s text, with the caveat that these are niggling petty criticisms, and concern a handful of examples in a sprawling text which covers some 15,000 lines of verse. Nonetheless, my chief niggles relate to metre, rhyme, and punctuation, and may be adumbrated with some brief examples. Metre first.

Not that scansion is everything, but if a writer deploys a foot such as the iamb, the reader naturally falls into an iambic rhythm, or the expectation of one, and this means, necessarily, that any deviations from the metre, or blips in the line, stand out, as here:

And so the silver age came in, somewhat more base than gold [Book 1]

The first four iambs to the caesura (after in) scan perfectly, but that stubborn little comma shifts the accent of the next syllables (in somewhat) to give a rather jarring spondee, or, at the very least, an unexpected trochee. The succeeding phrase more base than gold is clearly iambic, and so the effect of the somewhat in the middle of the line is unsettling – unless one insists that the qualifier somewhat is iambic, when it is not. This would be to force the reader to read against the rhythm of the poetry, and so to create a degree of rhythmic angst or discordia where none ought to be. Perhaps a better translation might have been

And so the silver age came in, more base by far than gold

— but I blush to suggest so simple a fix.

Next, rhyme.

Again, I am not, I hope, massively à cheval about full rhyme – insisting upon it to the detriment of sense or general euphony. Still, rhyme is important to the reading experience, and, as with metrical irregularity, can impair rather than guide the reader if it be in any (however minor) way deficient. Aside from such line endings as

all weighty kind of matter […] / and then the waving water [my emphasis]

which bring to mind poet Tony Harrison’s observation

Wordsworth’s matter/water are full rhymesa line from his 1974 poem Them & [uz]

(but are they meant to be, here? I cannot say), we have obviously deficient pairings such as:

fast/chaste
augment/he sent (a moderately Byronic mosaic rhyme)
flighty/weighty
worthily/apply
Mercury/fly
doom/come

None of these rhyme nor can be made to, and they are made more obvious, hence intrusive, by the masculine endings of the iambic fourteeners (which do so much to create beautiful melodious poetry where the rhyme does work, elsewhere).

Finally, the always problematic Anglo-Saxon genitivepossessive case, specifically in relation to nouns ending in s. Sorry, I really am this much of a pedant, please do bear with me.

In his preface to the text proper, Devere, explaining some of the stylistic methodology of his translation, addresses those singular possessives that end in s [which he explains will be] spelled with ’s (such as Achilles’s). This is good to know, and equally helpful is his note on pronunciation of these particular possessives, viz: that the ’s should be elided, not given an additional syllable. Hurry, Ned tells us, through the endings. And yet – and once again forgive my tiresome pedantry – very often the look of a word on the page can lead the reader to pronounce, or ‘hear’, a word in a different way to that intended by the poet. In other words, for all that Devere instructs us to read Achilles’s as tri-syllabic, many readers, me included, will more naturally expect that word to have four syllables – and this means potential issues with the scansion, or the flow of the metre, as here (but seen in other parts of the text too):

When Mercury had punished thus Aglauros’s spiteful tongue [Book 2]

If we scan the line we get four full iambs before hitting the proper noun Aglauros, which, with its (for me) superfluous ’s reads as a four-syllable unit: Ag-⁠lau-⁠ros-⁠es – this despite Devere’s instruction to elide and hurry through that final ’s ending. As we saw above, this kind of small stylistic issue can mean that the metre is compromised, or at least thrown out, by the (mis?) pronunciation of the possessive construction – a problem which could have been avoided, may I immodestly suggest, by dropping its use altogether. Words such as Achilles’ and Aglauros’ may be pronounced with an extra syllable, but at least there is no additional ’s ending to invite such a thing, meaning the reader is less likely to stray from the path of metrical propriety into the Forest of Polysyllabia.

But enough. These are piddling concerns set against the totality of the work and its melodiously crafted and consistently beautiful, sonorous music: Devere’s translation is a triumph, and minor subjective misgivings raised here may be ignored as the ramblings (that word again!) of a grouchy grammarian or vituperative versifier.

III

In the closing sections of METAMETAMORPHOSES Devere gives his readers a series of highly engaging appendices: a summary of the various metamorphoses in the text (for people who don’t like the poem)Ned: This was a gratuitous Monty Python reference, which I doubt anyone alive has caught. See this 2016 post for the explanation.; a tongue-in-cheek Venery section listing every sexual assault, rape, and near-rape in the poem; a wonderful little vignette on Ovid (late in life sent into exile because of an unnamed carmen et error); and a section devoted to a full bibliographical list of the ‘thirty seven (or so) texts written over thirty-three years’ by Arthur Golding.

And this is where Ned Devere drops his biggest bombshell. Really – it completely blindsided me, and still seems so exorbitant, so outrageous a claim, that I have not yet decided how to react.

Ned Devere, in the note to the entry about Golding’s First Four Books of P. Ovidius Naso’s work entitled Metamorphosis (1565), and in the note to the entry about the subsequent, more famous work, The XV Books of P. Ovidius Naso, entitled Metamorphosis (1567), claims that the true author of both works —⁠that is, the true author of the translation of the fifteen books of Ovid’s Metamorphoses⁠— was Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.

Consider the artful guile deployed here: saving this hugely controversial claim about the authorship of the text until page 511; doing so in such an insouciant, cocky, offhand manner; completely challenging and re-writing scholarly consensus on Arthur-as-Author, inviting the reader to ponder the implications of this claim in relation to the AQ. That is, if Oxford did use a front man for his Ovid translation, wouldn’t this give more credence to the idea that he then went on to pen the plays and poems of ‘Shakespeare’, all of them stuffed with Ovidian images, characters, allusions, and themes?

To exemplify the chutzpah of Devere’s gobsmacking front, consider his claim that the 1565 text was a trial balloon, William Cecil testing (in Ned’s words) whether Arthur would pass as the author, [and] Arthur whether he’d be crucified by his fellow Puritans for increasing access to such a sin-filled pagan work. Or the deftly deployed, deliberately underplayed comment about the 1567 translation: I finished the translation just before I began my law studies at Gray’s Inn that February. This is wild. This is seismic. And you don’t even get to it until you’ve finished the poem. (Though if you are reading this, I have spoiled the intended effect. Mea culpa.)

My reaction? Well, Devere is correct that, within the accepted Golding canon, stuffed full of treatises on divinity, translations of religious texts, and books about morality and suchlike, the Metamorphoses stand out – for all the wrong reasons. After all, here is a man whose whole creative output is defined by its deep commitment to Protestant orthodoxy: defending Elizabeth as God’s anointed, attacking Catholic dogma, promoting Christian moral values – and in the middle of it he translates a pre-Christian Roman poet whose writing celebrates erotic love (the Ars Amatoria), sensuality, sexual licence, and which revels in its evocation of figures such as bed-hopping Jove throwing himself on a range of hapless female victims. It certainly strains credulity to believe that this stern Puritan moralist suddenly threw himself into the equivalent of Renaissance soft pornography in mid-⁠career.

Devere’s claim that Oxford/he wrote the poem is further bolstered by de Vere’s known proficiency in Latin, his unfettered access to the vast library at Cecil House on the Strand, and by the fact of his having had ample time and leisure to undertake the work: means, motive, and opportunity, so to speak. Apropos, if Devere’s claim were ever to be accepted by the scholarly community (a long shotNed: that’s putting it mildly), we would suddenly have access to thousands of lines of de Vere’s poetry, long after it was believed that the bulk of his work as a courtier poet-playwright had been lost to the swirling mists of time.

As you can see, the after-shocks of the initial claim are no less profound and exciting than the claim itself. Brilliant – really. But the reader must decide whether or not he/she believes it. Do I? Not without documentary evidence of some kind. But I am completely open to the basic premise, and would like to learn more.

In the final sections About Sir Thomas Smith and So Why Arthur?, Devere amplifies his claim that he authored the Metamorphoses, thanks in large part to the role played by Cambridge don and polymath Sir Thomas, who tutored the young Earl from 1554 until the death of the 16th Earl in 1562. And what did Sir Thomas impart? First: an unparalleled education, as this clerk of the Privy Council, Regius Professor of Law and former provost of Eton College tutored de Vere (whom Ned says Smith dubbed his little sponge) one-to-one in Latin, the Classics, law, medicine, hawking, hunting, and the sciences. Devere recalls: As I became proficient there were weeks where we spoke nothing but Latin to one another. He taught my other subjects to me in Latin. I thought in Latin.

When the new Earl took his leave to go on to Cecil House as a royal ward of Lord BurghleyNed: My wardship began in 1562, Cecil wasn’t Lord Burghleyed until 1571. I too can play the pedant., Smith challenged him to translate Ovid when he thought he was up to the task. Per Devere, the rest is history: it was his book that was published in 1567 with Arthur as the convenient front man, ensuring that the book carried a real name of a known author, helping to avoid the stigma of printCJT: the unwritten rule that nobles didn’t publish openly, and giving the book, with Cecil’s careful support and guidance, its chance of literary immortality. It took me two more years [from the publication of the trial balloon] to finish the rest of the poem, Devere says. When I headed to Gray’s Inn at the beginning of 1567, the pages of Metamorphoses were left behind.

In summary, Devere’s METAMETAMORPHOSES is a most intriguing achievement: updating a work ostensibly penned by Golding, itself a translation of an ‘antique Roman’, which turns out to be a reworking of de Vere by de Vere himself – an outrageously clever and provocative act of self-referentiality and meta-⁠ing, with hundreds of pages of melodious, perfectly crafted verse the felicitous result. I greatly enjoyed my time with the text, but leave it still reeling from the Deverean Depth Charge which has been detonated. If what Ned claims be true, we need to re-think our view of de Vere as author of ‘lost works’, and head back to the Authorship Question newly armed with evidence that would tie together the two vast projects bookending his momentous life: Ovid at one end, Shake-⁠Speare at the other.

I commend this book to the reading public. Niche? Yes. Intimidating? Certainly. Too much for the sluggish gaping auditorThe phrase is Ben Jonson’s, from his poem On Poet-Ape. You can find it in Thy Stratford Moniment Revisited, by Alexander Waugh.? Quite possibly.

Worth your time?

Take this from this, if this be otherwise.

Ned’s End Matters

• Dog didn’t even get to the 📕web stuff.

• MUCH ADO ABOUT THE AQ — podcast:
UK English teachers Joe Payne and Dr CJ Taylor introduce listeners to the Shakespeare Authorship Question. Who actually was the Bard of Avon? Is this a conspiracy theory? Is that a bad thing? Tune in and find out! Listen on Acast, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify, or at YouTube if you like to watch two bearded chaps talking.

• If your cranium has room for another review, the DVS’s summer newsletter has one also, not half as long as this. Written by lawyer and actress Rosemary Loughlin, it looks at METAMETAMORPHOSES through a different pair of eyes. I know authors aren’t supposed to pay attention to their reviews, but I’ve enjoyed these because they’re both positive, yet very unalike. And Rosemary mentioned the web stuff.

• Newsletters are perks of society membership. The Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship is US-⁠based, the De Vere Society is UK-⁠based, but you can live anywhere and belong to either, or both. [Join the SOF] [Join the DVS]

• Anglo-Saxon genitives: ever a minefield. This Guardian story from two weeks ago (14 August) came from the AP (US) a day earlier.
• Tony Harrison is a prize-winning English poet and dramatist from Leeds. [theguardian.com]

• One last self-advert (for a while): MMM is available at Amazon.com and other national Amazon sites. Details are in the announcement post METAMETAMORPHOSES: The Boys Are Back (3 January 2024). Wherever you see it around the site, the 📕⁠⁠⁠little red book links to the MMM home page/index for all the extras. There’s a lot there.

• Image credits:

· Metamorphoseon (banner, detail): attributed to Antonio Tempesta, Amsterdam, 1606-1620, © Trustees of the British Museum

· 1567 Metamorphosis: page 01r, courtesy HathiTrust Digital Library, digitised by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

· Medieval Mercury turns Aglauros to stone: Cologny, Fondation Martin Bodmer, Codex Bodmer 49, f 34v, Christine de Pisan, Epitre d’Othea, c1460

· Sir Thomas Smith: from Books and Power in Tudor England: the Renaissance Library of Sir Thomas Smith, Queens’ College Old Library, Cambridge. Details in my post of 26 Sept 2019.

· Video: Hamlet, 1980, clip from A2 S2, BBC Shakespeare [imdb.com]. Directed by Rodney Bennett, with Eric Porter, Claire Bloom, and Patrick Stewart. Oxfordian Sir Derek Jacobi is Hamlet in this production, but alas he is not in the clip.

VERO NIHIL VERIUS

1 September 2024

· The review that wouldn’t fit in the SOF newsletter ·

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