OSMEÑA COLLEGES GRADUATE SCHOOL

City of Masbate, 5400, Philippines

Tel./Fax. (056) 333-2778
E-Mail address: osmenacolleges@yahoo.com.ph

PROFESSIONAL READINGS
JERIC ESPINOSA CABUG

Area: Teaching of Literature

Title of Article: Sex and Sexual Violence in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Author/s: Rachel Chung

Reference:

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. trans. Robert Hurley. vol. I. New York: Pantheon
Books, 1978. 77-154.

Infinite999. “Victor Frankenstein x Monster.” fanfiction.net. Apr 18,

2016. https://www.fanfiction.net/s/11903812/1/Victor-Frankenstein-x-Monster.
Kassidy62. “Unhallowed.” fanfiction.net. Nov 1,

2016. https://www.fanfiction.net/s/11590793/1/Unhallowed.
Olendris, Rama. “Shattered Realization.” fanfiction.net. Feb 1,
2006. https://www.fanfiction.net/s/2780681/1/Shattered-Realization.

Plato. The Symposium. Hackett Publishing Co., 1989.

Rigby, Mair. “Do You Share My Madness?: Frankenstein’s Queer Gothic.” Queering the
Gothic. ed. William Hughes and Andrew Smith,. Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2009. 36-54.

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. New York: Barnes and Noble, 2003.

Summary:

Anyone in pursuit of knowledge is bound to encounter sex somewhere along the way. In the

early 19th century, a period during which sex was unspeakable, fiction writers developed a

distinct penchant for the unknown. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a standard bearer for the

Gothic genre precisely because of its incorporation of the abnormal and slightly supernatural.

Victor Frankenstein makes a fatal misstep in attempting to do God’s work. He abandons his

Adam, who returns to plague and destroy his life.

Told through the framed account of a Captain Walton, who encounters Frankenstein in pursuit of

his monster across the frozen northern sea, Frankenstein begins with a brief account of his

picturesque childhood. Frankenstein begins his great experiment at university in Ingolstadt,

where he brings his horrifying creature to life. A year after panicking and abandoning the

monster, Frankenstein learns that his brother, William, has been murdered. Frankenstein’s

conviction that his monster is the murderer is confirmed when he encounters the creature in the

mountains outside of Geneva. In another layer of framed narrative, the monster gives an account

of his life so far—his unceremonious birth, his acquisition of language and knowledge from the

pure and impoverished De Lacey family, and his eventual turning away from the goodness of

mankind.

"The world was to me a secret which I desired to divine. Curiosity, earnest research to learn the

hidden laws of nature, gladness akin to rapture, as they were unfolded to me, are among the

earliest sensations I can remember."

The monster offers a truce in exchange for Frankenstein’s hand in the creation of a female mate

for the monster. Partway through the project, Frankenstein changes his mind and destroys the

new creature. Enraged, the monster wages war on Frankenstein and all he loves, and he wastes
no time in murdering Frankenstein’s beloved friend, Henry Clerval. In the time after Clerval’s

death, Frankenstein resumes planning his marriage to Elizabeth, his de facto foster sister. When

the monster murders Elizabeth on their wedding night, Frankenstein vows to pursue him to the

ends of the earth to exact his revenge. The narrative concludes with Walton’s account of

Frankenstein’s death. Walton returns to his cabin to find the monster poised over Frankenstein’s

body. Heartbroken, the monster says his final goodbyes to Frankenstein and resolves to end his

life.

Shelley’s text contains infinite iterations of the human condition, but the story has one glaring

omission: sex. Frankenstein is engaged to his childhood foster sister, Elizabeth, but we rarely see

the two alone together, and these encounters are characterized more by sibling-like affection than

by the romance and devotion of two people engaged to be married. Frankenstein himself is

especially sterile, almost frigid. His strict rejection of all things sexual speaks to the attitude of

the era. However, the deliberate omission of sex and sexuality from Frankenstein’s narrative

only makes it more present.4 Sex joins the ranks of the unspeakable horrors in the undercurrent

of Shelley’s text. Most notably, Frankenstein’s creature is born with human instincts, sexuality

among them. In his wish for a mate, Frankenstein’s monster exhibits more pointed human desires

than Frankenstein himself.

The relationship between Frankenstein and his monster has been the subject of countless

interpretations and reimaginings of Shelley’s original story, and it has taken countless different

forms. In his 2011 play of the same name, Nick Dear focuses on the Creature’s quest for

humanity against Frankenstein’s obsession with the empirical. The two men—as they are both

represented—struggle for the upper hand in a distinctly masculine, non-sexual relationship.

However, many authors have also explored the homoerotic nature of the relationship between
Frankenstein and his monster. Scholar Mair Rigby draws on Foucault’s The History of Sexuality

to discuss the nature of forbidden sexuality and queerness in “Do You Share My Madness?:

Frankenstein’s Queer Gothic.” She writes:

Gothic fiction tends to confirm the Foucauldian view that not only has sex been exploited as the

secret, but supposedly forbidden, desire but also that identities and behaviours have actually been

produced as more interesting and more subject to the demand for truth than those posited as

sexually ‘normal.’

Rigby writes about sex as a “privileged site of ‘truth,’ in which, by willfully omitting sex from

our representations of ourselves, we bring it even more into our lives. Frankenstein is, above all

else, a shining example of the time in which it was written. According to Rigby, the early 19th

century was a profoundly dangerous time to be open about sex, especially gay sex. Furthermore,

Foucault postulates that sexual activity perceived as abnormal is “more subject to the demand for

truth”—the absence of sex from the text highlights its secrecy, bringing it even farther forward in

the mind of the reader.

Reactions/Insights:

In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, familial borders are encroached upon by the public sphere

represented by the economic, political, scientific, and academic worlds. At the time of Shelley’s

writing, national borders were also threatened by the increasingly interdependent, global

economy and the destabilization of the British Empire as slave colonies revolted and demanded

independence. Frankenstein reflects these tumultuous concerns in its portrayal of family

relationships, which are complicated by extra familial sexual and emotional ties, and in the

creation of a monster who represents a sexualized, racial fear. At the core of these textual

tensions, fears and anxieties is a very real, flesh-and blood female author struggling to articulate
her own subjectivity in a male-dominated literary world which assumes that her first great work

belongs to her famous husband. This paper employs psychoanalytic theory as its main theoretical

framework. The theories of psychoanalysis can be applied to works of literature as a way of

exploring textual meaning. Using the psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Lacan to analyze

certain aspects of Frankenstein helps reveal the ways in which gender and sexuality shape Mary

Shelley’s representation of the culture of her day. Domestic and Public Spheres Domesticity, the

wall which separates the “female” domestic space of the novel from the “male” public sphere, is

invoked by Mary Shelley not, as some critics suggest, as a utopian solution to the (presumably

male) problems of the world, but rather as an articulation of the disastrous results of defining the

domestic and extra familial spheres as mutually exclusive. Victor Frankenstein’s narrative begins

with a genealogy. Clearly, Shelley is indicating that questions of family and lineage are to figure

importantly in his tale, but the genesis of the Frankenstein family is an unusual one. Victor’s

father, Alphonse, sees his bride for the first time kneeling by her father’s coffin “weeping

bitterly”. Alphonse takes Caroline under his wing and cares for her as if she were his child,

coming “like a protecting spirit to the girl, who committed herself to his care”. More a father

than husband, Alphonse shelters Caroline “as a fair exotic is sheltered by the gardener from

every rougher wind”. Caroline is portrayed as a plant capable of surviving only under the careful

cultivation of her surrogate caretaker . More significant, however, than Shelley’s caricature of a

weak, submissive wife is her choice to have Alphonse “gradually relinquish all his public

functions” in order to become “the husband and father of a family”. Domesticity is incompatible

with the “affairs of his country” and “public business” which previously dominated Alphonse’s

existence . The family unit created by the marriage of the elder Frankensteins and reaffirmed by

the birth of Victor cannot coexist with the world of politics and public affairs. Private life
completely precludes the possibility of public life for Alphonse Frankenstein. Alphonse’s

political ambitions are incompatible with the role of husband and father. This completely

gendered dichotomy creates a tension in the novel between the family and the “outside world” -a

world of exploration, adventure, politics, public affairs, academia, and intellectualism -to which

women like Victor’s wife and mother, confined in their domestic roles, have no access. Implicit

in the very structure of the nuclear family is a hierarchy headed by a father who provides for and

protects his wife, and who has complete authority over both her and their children. As critic

Steven Mintz points out, in the early nineteenth century, “it was an almost unquestioned premise

that…both natural and divine law endowed the father with patriarchal authority as ‘head’ of a

household” . Shelley depicts this hierarchy in her portrayal of Caroline Beaufort as a fragile plant

in need of shelter “from every rougher wind” and the Frankenstein children as the loyal subjects

of their father. When Elizabeth joins the Frankenstein household, she comes as “a pretty present”

for Victor, and thus the unequal relationship of Alphonse and Caroline is reproduced in that of

Victor and Elizabeth. From childhood, Victor views Elizabeth as chattel, saying, “I looked upon

Elizabeth as mine…a possession of my own”. In the domestic situation of Frankenstein, Shelley

gives us such a completely gendered representation of weak women in need of male protection

and careless men undone by unbridled ambition that the binaries of public and private, male and

female, presented in the novel demand to be read as a critique of the binaries themselves. The

very family that Shelley sets forth as the embodiment of domestic perfection reproduces in its

innate inequalities the dysfunctions of the hierarchical power structure which forces Caroline

Beaufort to submit herself to the care and control of her husband, and gives Victor his “pretty

present,” Elizabeth, in order to perpetuate this domestic perfection. Both women yield not only

their autonomy but also their lives for the sake of what Shelley terms “domestic affections”.
Frankenstein presents a gendered inequality in which wives yield to their husbands’ paternal

protection and young girls are given like prizes to the firstborn male. The familial power

structure functions only because the women are weaker than the men, and public life is

completely separate from private. The tragic deaths of all the novel’s female figures and the

ambivalence evident in Shelley’s vivid descriptions of the pleasures of pursuing knowledge

reveal her advocacy of the supreme importance of ensuring the “tranquility of domestic

affections” to be as riddled with internal tensions and conflicts as the nineteenth century family

itself .
 OSMEÑA COLLEGES GRADUATE SCHOOL
City of Masbate, 5400, Philippines
Tel./Fax. (056) 333-2778
E-Mail address: osmenacolleges@yahoo.com.ph

PROFESSIONAL READINGS
JERIC ESPINOSA CABUG

Area : Teaching of Literature

Title of Article: A 16th Century Ovid: The Influence of Classical Mythology on the

Understanding of Shakespeare's Plays

Author/s: Emily Gray

Reference:

Grant, Michael and John Hazel. Who’s Who in Classical Mythology. Oxford University

Press, 1993.

Ovid. “Book IV.” Metamorphoses. Trans. A.S. Kline. The University of Virginia, 1999.

Web. Accessed 6 December 2016. http://ovid.lib.virginia.edu/trans/Metamorph4.htm.
Root, Robert Kilburn. Classical Mythology in Shakespeare.  Edward Brothers, Inc., 1903. Print.
Rudd, Niall. “Pyramus and Thisbe in Shakespeare and Ovid.” Shakespeare’s Ovid:
The  Metamorphoses in the Plays and Poems. Edited by A.B. Taylor, Cambridge University
Press, 2000.

Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The Norton Shakespeare

Anthology: Essential Plays and Sonnets, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, et all, W.W. Norton &
Company, 2016, 209-268.

Taylor, A.B. “Introduction.” Shakespeare’s Ovid: The Metamorphoses in the Plays and

Poems.  Edited by A.B. Taylor, Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Velz, John W. “Shakespeare’s Ovid in the Twentieth Century: A Critical

Survey.” Shakespeare’s Ovid: The Metamorphoses in the Plays and Poems. Edited by A.B.
Taylor, Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Summary:

The abundance of mythic allusions present in nearly all of Shakespeare’s works are evidence of the

continued cultural influence of Greek and Roman mythology in the period during which he wrote.

The abundance of mythic allusions present in nearly all of Shakespeare’s works are evidence of

the continued cultural influence of Greek and Roman mythology in the period during which he

wrote. At the same time, they highlight the importance of the readers’ previous knowledge of

classical mythology in order to fully experience Shakespeare’s work. When examined with

special attention to the classical mythological influence, Shakespeare’s comedy A Midsummer

Night’s Dream  epitomizes the dynamic role of classical mythology in literature of both

providing context for the events of the play and helping the reader to come to a fuller

understanding of the implications associated with Shakespeare’s chosen allusions.

Regarded by many scholars as one of Shakespeare’s “most Ovidian” works, second only to the

long narrative poem Venus and Adonis, the comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream is saturated

with references to classical mythology spread throughout the entirety of the play (Velz 185).

Excluding the unavoidable specific references to characters in the play, this theatrical piece

contains approximately 37 individual mythological allusions. Of these 37, ten are either

definitively drawn from Ovid or contain reasonable traces of Ovidian influence, with the other

allusions ranging from the work of Vergil, to pagan-based nature myths, to numerous mentions

of various Greek and Roman deities (Root 122).

Believed to be written between 1590 and 1595, this play is representative of the humorous and

playful treatment of mythology that characterizes Shakespeare’s earlier works composed when

the influence of Ovid is most evident within his writing. Like his contemporaries, Shakespeare

found in Ovid, and by extension the whole of classical mythology, a “treasure-house of

fascinating stor(ies)” with previously established and easily recognizable plots and morals (Root
8). The influence of these selected allusions, although treated whimsically, adds a deeper level of

meaning to an otherwise light-hearted production, while simultaneously affecting the readers’

interpretation of this comedic work.

Beginning by examining allusions drawn from outside the realm of Ovidian mythology,

Shakespeare’s character of Theseus, Duke of Athens, can be traced to the portrayal of the

Athenian hero found in Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s work Lives of the Noble Greeks

and Romans (Root 111). The Theseus of antiquity is often considered to be the greatest Athenian

hero and is recognized for his unique combination of physical and intellectual strength; however,

that is not the picture painted by Shakespeare. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the love-struck

Duke is first introduced before his “nuptial hour” to the Amazonian Hippolyta lamenting how

slowly the remaining four days appear to be passing.

In addition to the narrative of his capture of and subsequent marriage to Hippolyta featured in

Shakespeare’s play, many variations of the original myth of Theseus also include detailed

accounts of Theseus’s previous romantic endeavors (Grant and Hazel 326). These tales of his

encounters with women like Antiope, Perigenia, and Aegle are not directly incorporated into the

comedy’s storyline by Shakespeare; instead, he relies on readers being familiar with the classical

mythology surrounding Theseus to convey important aspects of the Duke’s character.

For instance, Oberon, the king of the fairies, accuses his wife, Titania, of being secretly in love

with Duke Theseus by stating that she “led him through the glimmering night/ from Perigenia”

and aided him in obtaining mistresses in the forms of “fair Aegles…with Ariadne, and Antiopa”

(2.1.77-80). Through the simple inclusion of this brief reference to Theseus’s former and

tumultuous affairs, Shakespeare calls into question the sincerity of Duke’s initial speech and

apparent impatience regarding his impending wedding to Hippolyta. By invoking these specific
episodes from the extensive narrative of Theseus, Shakespeare relies on the influence of classical

mythology to subvert the idea of Duke Theseus as a sensitive, caring lover and remind readers of

the promiscuous, callous warrior that he truly is.

Like Theseus, the characterization of Hippolyta has roots in North’s translation of Plutarch’s

iconic work. In fact, Shakespeare’s change in spelling from the traditional “Ipolita” used by

Chaucer to his preferred “Hippolyta” is the direct result of the powerful influence of North’s

handling of the original Greek text . In keeping with the Hippolyta espoused by Shakespeare,

traditional mythology confirms his version of Hippolyta as the reluctant, battle-won bride of the

formidable Athenian hero, Theseus. While Shakespeare chooses not to include the details of

Hippolyta’s past adventures within the confines of this play, they are the subject of much myth-

making and provide important insights into the narrowly developed character present in

Shakespeare’s comedy.

Although Theseus does make mention of the fact that he “wooed with his sword/ and won [her]

love doing injuries,” he does not elaborate on the underlying cause of said battle. According to

one version of the myth surrounding Hippolyta, during Theseus’s campaign against the Amazons

of Themiscyra, the great warrior captured Antiope, Hippolyta’s sister, and proceeded to carry her

back to Attica. Devastated and enraged at the loss of her sister, the Amazonian queen,

accompanied by the rest of her man-hating tribe, launched an attack on Theseus’s kingdom. Even

though the Amazons are said to have controlled the hill of Pnyx, Theseus is ultimately

victorious. Hence, Antiope withdraws to Megara, where she dies. Hippolyta, now mourning the

death of her beloved sister, is taken as Theseus’s prisoner and forced to marry her captor. In

many variations, Hippolyta is forced to undergo the ultimate form of subjugation for an Amazon:

she is forced to bear Theseus’s son, Hippolytus (Grant and Hazel 176). Although she is portrayed
neutrally and is restricted to few lines of speech, the knowledge of these crucial events in

Hippolyta’s mythology influences the readers’ impression of her underdeveloped character. By

employing this reference to Hippolyta, Shakespeare is able convey her justified unwillingness to

marry Duke Theseus without having to include a detailed retelling of the events that have led to

her and the Duke’s looming marital hour.

Easily the most prominent and well-developed allusion in all of Shakespeare, the presence of the

rude mechanicals’ version of Pyramus and Thisbe leads to the “delicious burlesque” of an

originally somber Ovidian story (Root 11). As told in Book Four of the Metamorphoses, the

story of Pyramus and Thisbe is the tragic tale of the two most beautiful Babylonian youths who

have fallen in love with each other and desire to move towards marriage. Because their fathers

have forbidden their romance, the young lovers are resigned to communicating solely through

the hole in their shared wall.

This separation and secrecy only makes their passions burn hotter, finally causing them to make

plans to meet under cover of night outside the city. When she reached the rendezvous point,

Thisbe is frightened by a lion and drops her veil. Pyramus, seeing the blood-stained shawl lying

on the ground, assumes his beloved to have been killed and commits suicide. Shortly thereafter,

Thisbe returns and, finding Pyramus’s corpse, follows suit and kills herself (Kline). While the

gravity of this story is undeniable, Shakespeare manipulates and satirizes the same features that

cast Ovid’s original as a romantic tale to show the production of the tradesmen as a complete

farce, thereby forcing readers to confront the wider implications and influence the presence of

this myth wields over the remainder of the play.

Shakespeare introduces the inversion and manipulation of traditional mythology from the first

moment Bottom and his fellow tradesmen begin contemplating performing a play for the Duke’s
upcoming wedding. When searching for a suitable drama, Peter Quince proposes that the

hodgepodge troupe put on a play entitled “The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death

of Pyramus and Thisbe”  (1.2.8-9). This obvious combination of paradoxical adjectives in the

title of mechanicals’ play can be viewed as Shakespeare’s deliberate attempt to add an element

of humor to the otherwise grave narrative, accordingly setting the stage for the rest of the group’s

equally entertaining and disastrous performance. Shakespeare goes on to include such verbal

absurdities as Bottom’s line, “I see a voice; now will I to the chink/ to spy an I can hear my

Thisbe’s face” and his unnecessary description of the night as being “ever art when day is not”.

As Bottom speaks both of these lines while playing the role of Pyramus, they serve to undermine

the readers’ perceptions of the mythological Babylonian youth as a serious, mature,

knowledgeable character by depicting him as a good-intentioned but bumbling fool. Along the

same lines, Shakespeare takes full advantage of the Latin possessive structure ad busta Nini,

meaning “the tomb of Ninus,” (Rudd 116) in his rendering of Pyramus’s request for Thisbe to

“meet [him] at Ninny’s tomb straightway” (5.1.200). These oral blunders, combined with

Thisbe’s repeated distorted allusions to “Ninny’s tomb” (5.1.252) and her breaking of the

metaphorical fourth wall in the closing of her dying speech with “adieu, adieu, adieu,” (5.1.335)

work to destroy the illusion of legitimacy typically created by the theatre, thus shattering any

possibility of readers familiar with the traditional Ovidian tale viewing this moment of meta-

theatre as a viable source of meaning or a fulfillment of the original myth’s pathos.

By making it impossible for Bottom and his colleagues to be taken seriously as their respective

classical characters, Shakespeare forces readers to search for echoes of Ovid’s classical

mythology in a different source within his own play. In the gauche version of the myth presented

by Bottom’s ensemble of rude mechanicals, the story of Pyramus and Thisbe parodies the
relationship of Lysander and Hermia. Just as Pyramus and Thisbe’s youthful love has been

prohibited by their fathers, Hermia’s stern, controlling father, Egeus, has proscribed her from

marrying her chosen suitor and is insisting that she submit to his will by marrying Demetrius

In response to his demands, Hermia begs the penalty of disobedience but not before asserting

that she “know(s) not by what power [she] is made bold”. This phrase seems to be the direct

result of Shakespeare’s familiarity with Ovid’s rendition of Thisbe, whose motivations are

explained by the phrase audacem faciebat amor, which translates to “Love made her bold”

(Rudd 119). The parallels between the accounts of starry-eyed love found in Ovid and

Shakespeare carry over into Lysander’s response to their seemingly hopeless situation. When

faced with the impasse of his beloved either being put to death or becoming a nun, the young

Athenian boy appeals to Hermia by saying, “If thou lovest me then/ Steal forth thy father’s

house tomorrow night/And in the wood, a league without the town” will he meet her (1.1.163-

165). This description of the young lovers’ plan echoes Pyramus and Thisbe’s resolve

“to steale out of their fathers house and eke the Citie gate…they did agree at Ninus Tomb

to meete without the towne” (Rudd 119). Here, Shakespeare’s deliberate and overt borrowings

from Ovid serve to provide readers with a sort of “distorted mirror-image” of potentially tragic

romantic love (Rudd 118). By utilizing the influence of classical mythology in this manner,

Shakespeare effectively complicates and adds an element of seriousness to a depiction of love

that on its own could be considered too sweet, naïve, idealized, and sentimental.

Throughout the drama, Shakespeare’s repeated and extensive incorporation of elements from

classical mythology into A Midsummer Night’s Dream adds a second level of meaning to that

already present in the text of the play. By calling upon iconic characters from antiquity in the

forms of Theseus and Hippolyta, Shakespeare is able to successfully invoke the influence of
these characters’ respective and entangled myths to not only give readers a truer sense of his own

characters, but also to provide context for their actions within the comedy.

Through his inclusion of the distorted and caricatured telling of Ovid’s Pyramus and Thisbe, the

playwright requires readers to look elsewhere for the gravitas traditionally associated with this

tragic tale. In doing so, Shakespeare lends a sense of seriousness and legitimacy to his account of

the relationship between Lysander and Hermia that would otherwise be overshadowed by the

lunacy and hilarity of their misadventures in the woods. Ultimately, the influence of

Ovid’s Metamorphoses over the writings of Shakespeare is neither confined to his casting of

Theseus and Hippolyta nor to the theme of young love depicted by Hermia and Lysander but is

felt, albeit in varying degrees of significance and strength, over the course of the entire play.

Reactions/Insights:

The Roman poet Ovid (45 B.C.–17 A.D.) began his literary career in youth, reciting his Amores

to the public when barely bearded. After that the chronology of his life and works becomes more

sketchy. The Heroides or Heroic Epistles follow the Amores and represent Ovid in his prime.

The first 14 epistles are imaginary love letters in elegiac verse from legendary women to their

absent husbands or lovers. These include letters from Penelope to Ulysses (illustrated on Spread

5), Dido to Aeneas (illustrated on Spread 43), Ariadne to Theseus (illustrated on Spread 60) and

Medea to Jason (illustrated on Spread 68). Number 15 is a letter from Sappho to Phaon of

uncertain authenticity: it is here printed at the end of the Heroides (Spreads 116–22). Numbers

16-21 are correspondence, rather than letters in a bottle, with the male initiating and the woman

responding. Here, for instance, Paris and Helen correspond (illustrated on Spreads 83 and 91) as

do Hero and Leander (illustrated on Spreads 98 and 103). The volume concludes with Ibis

(Spreads 123–41), a polemical poem addressed to an unknown enemy, suitably introduced by a

handsome woodcut of the laureated poet composing, while storks catch vipers to feed their

young, and a naked female with pendulous breasts holds up the legend INVIDIA (ordinarily the

deadly sin of Envy, but here more properly translated Odium). The Heroides were first published

as part of Ovid’s collected works in Venice in 1474. The present edition is one of several

separate editions of Ovid from the press of Alessandro Paganino in the early 16th century, and

printed in his distinctive and beautiful italic type. These include editions of the Metamorphoses

(1521 and 1526), the Ars Amandi or Art of Love (1526), the Tristia (1526) and the Fasti (1521

and 1527). Paganino had published an earlier edition of the Heroides in 1515 while still in

Venice, with scantier commentary, and another in 1516 that included the Amores and several

other pieces. Like the Metamorphoses, the Heroic Epistles offered great pictorial possibilities.

The first illustrated edition was a translation into Italian, published in Naples around 1474. It was

followed by some three dozen other illustrated editions before this printing by Paganino: as usual

with early woodcuts, there was much copying and imitation. The massive surrounding

commentary, assembled from the editions of such celebrated scholars of the previous century as

Antonio Volsco, Ubertino da Crescentino, Domizio Calderino and Josse Badius, embraces as it

dwarfs the text in the manner of old editions of Gratian or the Talmud.