12. Virgilianisms and Ovidianisms in the English Renaissance

1In terms of the genre of epic, the landscape of the English Renaissance, like that of Augustan Rome, is dominated by two poems. In Rome: the Aeneid, emerging as the classic of Rome’s national literature in the same years that the victorious Octavian was solidifying into Augustus, the first princeps; and the Metamorphoses, written in the later years of Augustus’ principate, and prescient, in Ovid’s and Ovid’s readers’ hindsight, of the poet’s own expulsion from the cultural and political centre of Rome. In England: Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590 and 1596), written in the later years of Queen Elizabeth, and declaring itself a celebration of the glory of Gloriana – Elizabeth by another name –, the last monarch of the Tudor dynasty, which based its legitimacy partly on the claim to have brought order to England after the civil wars of the fifteenth century; and Milton’s Paradise Lost, whose first edition in ten books appeared in 1667, and a second edition in twelve books