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As she fled: women and movement in early modern English poetry and drama

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As she fled: women and movement in early modern English poetry and drama

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AS SHE FLED:
WOMEN AND MOVEMENT
IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH POETRY AND DRAMA

by
Amy Margaret Braden

________________________________________________________________________
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)

May 2010

Copyright 2010 Amy Margaret Braden
ii

Table of Contents

List of Figures iii
Abstract iv

Chapter One
Daphne’s Chase: Compelling Movement from Ovid’s Metamorphoses 1
Apollo’s Chase 7
Daphne’s Flight 10
Option of Flight 19
Sprinting Ahead 24

Chapter Two
Running Toward Elizabeth:
Female Subjectivity and Daphne in the 1591 Entertainments at Sudeley 26
Chastity, the Queen, and the Tree 30
Refusing to be Written 39
Embodying a Shared Subjectivity 51

Chapter Three
Outpacing Daphne: Running without Metamorphosis in The Faerie Queene 58
Faster than Virgin Virtue and Vice 60
Separated by Flight: The Two Florimells 65
Always the Same 70
Rejecting the Laurels 79

Chapter Four
An Abnormal Pattern of Pursuit:
The Ovidian Chase in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream 92
Abnormal Patterns of Pursuit 96
Running Love 101
Female to Male, Male to Female: Eliding Differences in the Chase 106
Staging the Chase 119

Epilogue 125

Bibliography 135

iii

List of Figures
Figure 1: Aneau, Barthélemy: Picta poesis (1552) 46
Figure 2: Raphael Regius, Metamorphoses 48
Figure 3: Linear Chase 121
Figure 4: Staging the Chase 122

iv

Abstract

The argument of this dissertation stimulates the intersections of early modern
performance, gender studies, and poetics as it investigates sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century literature that appropriates the figure of the chaste, fleeing woman. I argue that
despite the insistence of early modern texts that female movement indicates sexual
incontinence and that chaste women ought to stay at home, many early modern fictions
betray a fascination with the idea of women in motion and, most specifically, with the
figure of Daphne, who famously flees from Apollo, the god of poetry. In these texts, the
fleeing woman becomes a complicated source of poetic inspiration with both historical
and literary roots.
Edmund Spenser’s Florimell, the best-known image of the fleeing woman in early
English poetry, is all the more compelling because she follows the literary footsteps of
both the Ovidian nymph and her Elizabethan counterparts in the court entertainments of
John Lyly. Shakespeare’s Helena likewise revitalizes and redefines the story of Daphne
as she flies through the forests of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in pursuit of her own love
object. While sixteenth-century writers made a virtual project of setting literary women
in flight, seventeenth-century poets such as Thomas Carew and Philo-Philippa take the
figure one step further by asserting a stronger identification with the fleeing woman than
with her pursuer, the god of poetry. In short, while literary scholarship tends to
emphasize the way that poets and dramatists aim to control the fleeing woman in order to
claim poetic authority, my work attends instead to the way that the subjectivity of the
fleeing woman thwarts such poetic efforts. Her independent movement compels poets to
v

engage with a form of female subjectivity that challenges gender norms and assumptions
about passive female virtues. I argue that as early modern poets expand the imaginative
boundaries of the fleeing female for their own poetic purposes, they unintentionally open
up space for feminist writers to re-examine and reclaim female agency in early modern
texts.

1

Chapter One
Daphne’s Chase: Compelling Movement from Ovid’s Metamorphoses

Away Penaeis stale
With fearful steppes, and left him in the midst of all his tale.
And as she ran the meeting windes her garments backeward blue,
So that hir naked skinne apearde behind her as she flue,
Hir goodly yellowe golden haire that hanged loose and slacke,
With every puffe of ayre did wave and tosse behinde hir backe.
Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Arthur Golding, trans.1567)

Still as she fled, her eye she backward threw,
As fearing euill, that persewd her fast;
And her faire yellow locks behind her flew.
Loosely disperst with puffe of euery blast:
All as a blazing starre doth farre outcast
His hearie beames, and flaming lockes dispred,
At sight whereof the people stand aghast:
Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590)
1

Edmund Spenser’s account of Florimell’s erotic flight offers a startlingly exact
imitation of Arthur Golding’s 1567 translation of the details of Daphne’s fleeing body in
Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
2
Spenser also names Daphne in direct comparison to Florimell
in canto vii Book III of the Faerie Queene. And Florimell’s extreme fear, overwhelming
beauty, and disregard for the words of her pursuers clearly link her to Daphne. Yet, it is
the stunning effect of Daphne’s ability to escape that is most attractive to Spenser. His
almost exact reproduction of the particulars of Daphne’s flight, from her fearful steps to
her loose hair that puffs with every blast of air, exposes an obsessive attention to the

1
Arthur Golding, trans., Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 1567 (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 639-44 . Edmund.
Spenser, The Faeire Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche, Jr. (New York: Penguin, 1987), III.i.16.
2
Spenser’s representation of Florimell as a Daphne-like figure is generally mediated by Ariosto’s depiction
of Angelica in the Orlando Furioso, but Spenser’s description of the details of Florimell’s flight most
closely resembles Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. I agree with Thomas Roche who writes
that the flight of Florimell is “clearly indebted to the first canto of Orlando Fuiroso, where Angelica rushes
madly away from her rash of lovers,” but I am more interested in how Spenser resorts to imitating Ovid’s
description of Daphne for the details, as opposed to the general narrative structure, of Florimell’s chaste
flight. Thomas Roche, The Kindly Flame (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), 11.
2

details of the fleeing female body. In fact, Spenser introduces Florimell almost entirely
in terms of her self-generating flight and identifies her flight as the source of her awful
attractiveness. Her amazing endurance literally separates her from the other characters,
including the other figures of chastity such as Britomart, Belphoebe, and Amoret. When
he compares Florimell directly to Ovid’s Daphne, he boasts that Daphne did not run
“halfe so fast to saue her maidenhead” as Florimell (III.vii.25.3). By imagining his
fleeing woman running so far and so fast that she escapes her pursuers and the stifling
effects of Daphne’s metamorphosis, Spenser enacts a common early modern poetic
fantasy of freeing the fleeing woman into perpetual motion.
Spenser is not the only early modern English poet enthralled by the Ovidian
figure of the fleeing woman. Despite the insistence of early modern texts that female
movement indicated sexual incontinence and that chaste women stayed at home, many
early modern English fictions betray a fascination with the idea of chaste women in
motion.
3
Some follow Petrarch in their efforts to capture the fleeing woman in their
poetic verses in order to advertise their ability to capture the laurels of poetic authority.
But the poets included in this project are much more interested in keeping the figure of

3
Multiple domestic handbooks and sermons in early modern England, including Coverdale’s The Cristen
State of Matrimonye (1541), Hake’s A Touchstone for this Time Present (1574), and Smith’s Preparative to
Marriage (1591) proclaim that true chastity is best displayed and proved by the stillness of the female body
within the safe space of her home. In his Preparative to Marriage, Henrie Smith prioritizes a woman’s
residence indoors as the most crucial indicator of her chastity. Smith insists that a chaste woman does not
venture out of doors when he explains that “Salomon bade Shimei go not beyond the river; (1 Kings,
2:36,37).” Smith insists that “a wife should teach her feete, goe not beyond the dore; she must count the
wals of her house, like the bounds of the river which Shimei might not passe.
3
” Here, he extends control
over the woman’s body to her actions as well as her location. Within her house, the chaste woman is to
count the walls—thus not only should she not venture out beyond the walls of her house, but her entire
existence should be defined by activities related to the stable permanence of those walls.
3

female flight moving. They display the glory of their imaginations by overcoming the
stasis of the fixed laurel tree.
In the early modern texts examined in the following chapters, the fleeing woman
is a complicated source of poetic inspiration, and her subjectivity thwarts poetic efforts to
trap her in verse. Her independent movement compels poets to engage with a form of
female subjectivity that challenges dualistic gender norms and assumptions about passive
female virtues.
4
Daphne’s subjectivity is unique in Ovid, since it is manifested primarily
in her body rather than in her voice. While many scholars look to a character’s speech or
verbalized sense of interiority or evidence of her “subjectivity,” this project uses the term
“subjectivity” to refer to a female character’s ability to demonstrate a sense of
independent volition regardless of whether the text grants her the oral/aural space to
articulate her desires in words.
5
Following the work of other early modern scholars who
underscore the importance of gestures and bodily actions in early modern texts, this
project scrutinizes the body of the fleeing female subject. The fact that the she escapes
even the poets who attempt to capture her in verse is a crucial sign of subjectivity since it
indicates an interiority that is distinct from the structured categories and expectations of

4
Katherine McKinley’s argument about the wide range of medieval and Renaissance responses to the
heroines of Books 6-10 in the Metamorphoses is relevant to my analysis of the poetic engagement of 16
th-

and 17
th
-century engagments with Daphne in Book I. She writes that “each medieval and early modern
‘reader’ . . . whether offering a summary, commentary, and/or edition, must engage Ovid’s use of the
feminine in the Metamorphoses (as in the Heroides) to represent the psychological conflict and self-
interrogation; the results are rich and varied and therefore provide a more complicated (thus more
historically accurate) view of the ways in which Ovid’s heroines were read from the fifth through the
seventeenth centuries.” Reading the Ovidian Heroine, 1100-1618 (Leiden: Brill, 2001), xiv.
5
Katherine McKinley defines “subjectivity” as a “character’s ability to manifest some degree of authentic
volition and agency within the unavoidable constraints culture, gender, society, class, and a host of other
variables impose upon her.” McKinley focuses primarily on whether early modern writers include the
scenes of female “reflection and self-interrogation” in their commentaries, translations, and revisions, xv.
4

narratives; her embodied elusiveness qualifies the fleeing woman as more than an object
or concept.
This project is indebted to many twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholars who
have opened the doors for complicated analyses of the appropriation of Ovid’s female
characters in early modern literature. In particular, my analysis stands on Katherine
McKinley’s arguments about the interest of early modern readers in the subjectivity of
Ovid’s female heroines in the Metamorphoses. McKinley offers an invaluable model for
acknowledging the problems with Ovid’s misogynistic representations of rape at the
same time that she argues that “it is, however, possible to see Ovid taking steps to
increase the heroine’s capacity for self-interrogation, and such steps help to counter
limiting representations of women in these periods.”
6
McKinley’s insistence on reading
Ovid through multiple strands of interpretation prompts historically sensitive analyses
attuned to the heterogeneous nature of literature and its reception. I appreciate her
assertion that “it is possible to examine [Ovid’s] works for the range of views he
manifests in his construction of the feminine.” With an acceptance of inconsistent
valences in Ovid’s text, this project values analyses by scholars who critique the
misogynistic tendencies of Ovid’s beautification of female fear at the same time that it
prioritizes Ovid’s investment in the subjectivity of autonomous female characters.
7

6
McKinley, xvii.
7
Amy Richlin addresses the issues of representing female flight when she argues that “women’s fear is
displayed [in the Metamorphoses] only to make them more attractive.” She explains “we [in the 20
th

century] have this myth, too, in comedies and action romances (squeaky voice: “Put me down!”); it is part
of the plot. Likewise, for the Sabine women, there is really nothing to be worried about, because they are
getting married. Their fears are cute (see Modleski 1982: 46), and the whole thing is a joke.” Richlin’s
argument offers a much needed critique of the representation of the attractiveness of women’s refusal, but
she reads Ovid’s poem only from Apollo’s perspective. Like Apollo, she considers Daphne’s flight only as
a response to his pursuit rather than as a form of expressing independent female ambitions. In “Reading
5

McKinley’s compelling proof that “within one poet . . . contradictory perspectives can
function, even flourish”
8
allows me to examine how multiple impulses regarding female
flight thrive within Ovid’s stories. Even though she does not offer an analysis of the
figure of Daphne, McKinley’s explorations of characters such as Atalanta and Myrrha
have fostered my own interest in the ways in which early modern poets grapple with
embodied female subjectivity.
Two other scholars have engaged in detailed examinations of the appropriation of
the specific story of Apollo and Daphne in early modern literature. In an article that
shares my specific interest in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry, Christine Rees
provides an extensive overview of over fifteen printed poems that make direct reference
to Daphne. She argues that Daphne’s transformation into the laurel tree stands in for the
general concept of metamorphosis in the Renaissance; in her analysis, Daphne plays a
central role for writers coming to terms with the spiritual and metaphysical issues of the
instability and mutability of the natural world. Published almost fifteen years later, Mary
Barnard’s book The Myth of Apollo and Daphne from Ovid to Quevedo maintains Rees’s
focus on Daphne’s metamorphosis. She surveys the way that medieval Christian
commentators and the poets, Petrarch, Garcilaso, and Quevedo, grapple with what she
argues are the grotesque elements of Daphne’s transformation into the tree. I am deeply
grateful for the attention that both Rees and Barnard grant to the multiple uses of the tale
of Apollo and Daphne in early modern literature. The vast scope of their projects testifies
to the prominence of the figure of Daphne in the early modern imagination.

Ovid’s Rapes,” Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome, ed. Amy Richlin (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1992), 158-179.
8
McKinley, xvii.
6

My argument departs from theirs by focusing on how early modern English poets
are as interested in Daphne’s fleeing movement as in her metamorphosis. I argue that the
impulse to engage Daphne’s story often stems from an unwillingness to leave her in the
stillness of the laurel. The attractiveness of the female body in flight is what inspires
poetic revisions. As Ovid stresses, it is not the tree but rather the female movement that
makes Daphne alluring. Once she turns into the tree, upon which poets can inscribe their
own achievements, Daphne often loses the force of her appeal as a compelling poetic
figure. As a result, poets and dramatists tap into their most creative sources to expand the
boundaries of female flight.
Even though the fantasy of Daphne fleeing without end seems like a radical
revision, it is actually a literalization of Ovid’s initial description of the process of
Daphne’s metamorphosis into the tree. Ovid’s line “refugit tamen oscula lignum” asserts
that her flight continues even after her transformation into the laurel. Arthur Golding
translates the line as “He proferde kisses to the tree, the tree did from him writhe,”
9
and
contemporary translations usually read something like, “the wood shrank from his
kisses.” But it is Ovid’s Latin line that first stresses Daphne’s continuing flight since the
word "refugit" contains the word “fugit” with which Ovid emphasizes Daphne’s
independence and resistance throughout the narrative. Commonly translated as “writhe”
or “shrink,” “refugit” might also mean “to flee away from.” By using this verb, Ovid
prioritizes the movement of flight as the crucial indicator of Daphne’s refusal, even when
she is bound within tree. Thus, although Daphne has been transformed into the laurel,

9
Arthur Golding. Ovid’s Metamorphosis, 1567, I.682.
7

Ovid’s use of “refugit” defines Daphne as always already fleeing and evading Apollo’s
grasp.

Apollo’s Chase

Ovid’s figure of the virgin who is always already fleeing allures some early
modern writers and readers because his narrative suggests that her movement is
compelled simultaneously and paradoxically by the male chase and her own independent
desires. At the heart of Ovid’s story of Apollo and Daphne is the phrase that arrests the
interest of feminist readers because it epitomizes the enigma of the chase: (auctaque
forma fuga est) or “Daphne’s fleeing enhances her form” (530). The crisis for both
Daphne and Apollo results from Apollo’s reading of her flight as appealing.
10
At the
heart of the story is Apollo’s misreading of female flight.
Daphne’s flight attracts Apollo because it represents to him his ability to compel
her action. To Apollo Daphne’s flight signifies his prowess. He assumes: Daphne flees
because he chases her. Like a videogame player with a game controller, Apollo
(“requiemque negat”) or “allows her no rest” (541), compelling her movement with
movements of his own. He articulates the connection between their movements when he
tells her to “run more slowly, check your flight, and I too will follow more slowly”
(“moderatius, oro, curre fugamque inhibe, moeratius insequar ipse” 510-11). His
promise to slow his pursuit if she slows her pace reflects his belief that she runs only in

10
As Kathryn Gradval argues, the shift in the meaning of the word ravir “reveals the assumption that
whatever is attractive begs to be ravished: carried off, seized, or raped.” Kathryn Gravdal, Ravishing
Maidens (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1991).
8

response to his pursuit, not out of any of her own independent desires. Apollo limits the
motivations for her flight to the forward motion and speed of his own chase. He
envisions her only as the object of his pursuit who moves in response to his own
movement. Thus, even though Apollo fails to “catch” Daphne, his chase nevertheless
displays male control over female movement. Apollo holds to the delusional belief that
her flight has mechanical instead of voluntary motivations.
The ability “to move” Daphne resonates distinctly for Apollo who, as the god of
poetry, has the fundamental goal of persuading his listeners. If one of the general goals of
rhetoric, according to Aristotle and Cicero, is to move (mouere) one’s audience, Daphne’s
fleeing might be read by Apollo, the god of poetry, as a demonstration of how his poetry
moves its listener. As the god of poetry, Apollo does not conceive of motivations for
Daphne’s flight outside of his own powers of persuasion. In fact, he interprets her
fleeing, not as a sign of the failure of his poetry or her purposeful resistance to it, but
rather as a sign of her inability to understand it. He yells out to her, “you do not know,
thoughtless girl, you do not know from whom you flee, and so you flee” (“nescis,
temeraria, nescis, /quem fugias, ideoque fugis” 514-515), and thereby attempts to
articulate her motivation as an absence of motivations—she runs due to a lack of
knowledge—because Apollo does not think outside of his own dualistic paradigm
wherein he is the poetic chaser and she is the listener.
His efforts at rhetorical persuasion also include an appeal for Daphne to slow
down to alleviate his worries. He yells out to her, “[you] might fall headlong or thorns
undeservedly scar your legs and I be a cause of grief to you” (“ne prona cadas indignave
9

laedi crura notent sentes et sim tibi causa doloris” 508-9). He utters these lines under the
pretense of preventing her injury, but in doing so, the god of poetry actually attempts to
gain control over the progression of her flight by narrating its potential consequences.
11

With his articulation of his fears, Apollo’s meta-diegetic narration gives shape to the
image of Daphne falling and scratching her legs even though the narrator’s authoritative
version does not follow Apollo’s prediction.
12
The multiple options that Apollo presents
for mishaps from Daphne’s flight expose his enjoyment of the creative productivity of
imagining his own ability to narrate her torture.
For Apollo, Daphne is a subject only insofar as she responds to his actions and his
words. Apollo’s perspective, therefore, anticipates Althusser’s theories of interpellation.
The male chase interpellates the fleeing female into a narrative system where she is the
prey and he is the predator. Lynn Enterline explains that
where Althusser’s subject recognizes his subjection in the call of a policeman in
the street, Ovid’s women recognize their subjection as women when suddenly
hailed by a god bent on rape. They recognize themselves as subjects in the
violent call of someone else’s desire. And they become the beauty they are called
to embody by turning Althusser’s moment of recognition into flight.
13

Within this paradigm, Daphne exists only as a subject in the sense that she is subjected to
the male chase. The system denies her own motivations, and her flight acts simply as

11
Vanda Zajko argues that “the ability [Daphne] has to cause Apollo pain could be seen as articulating
something important about the experience of desire. The play of power between the two that is rendered
visible by the shifts of perspective in the way the story is told makes it hard to read it as a straightforward
rape narrative.” Vanda Zajko, “Petruchio is ‘Kated’: The Taming of the Shrew and Ovid,” Shakespeare and
the Classics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 40.
12
Some scholars argue that Apollo’s perspective is both limited and foolish in Ovid’s story. For example,
Mary Barnard stresses that Ovid’s story mocks Apollo in The Myth of Apollo and Daphne from Ovid to
Quevedo: Love, Agon, and the Grotesque (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987). Syrithe Pugh also
argues that: “the violence and injustice of the gods in the Metamorphoses, particularly those to whom
Augustus was mot often compared, Apollo and Jove, can be read as an indictment of the abuses to which
absolute power is open,” Spenser and Ovid (Burlington: Ashgate, 2005), 3.
13
Enterline, Lynn. The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000), 33.
10

proof of male control over all aspects of her sexuality, even as she flees away from the
male predator. This perspective, aligned with Apollo’s in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, allows
the female no motivations of her own outside of her role as the one who is chased since
she exists as a subject only insofar as she fits into the relationship as a potential rape
victim.

Daphne’s Flight

Ovid’s story, however, does not fully confirm the reading of Daphne as the one
who is perpetually subjected and never the acting subject. In his version of the myth,
Ovid offers an alternative to Apollo’s perspective of Daphne’s flight. He invites his
readers to resist Apollo’s interpretation of the chase by providing avenues of
identification with the female subject on her own terms. Ovid prioritizes Daphne’s
independent movement as a crucial indicator of her own subjective desires. Her flight
displays an agenda that runs counter to Apollo’s foolish pursuit and interpretation of her
body.
14

At the beginning of his version, Ovid establishes a reversal of expected causes
since, contrary to Apollo’s beliefs, Daphne’s fleeing provokes Apollo’s chase more than
his chase provokes her flight. Many readers of Ovid’s story—from the sixteenth-century
poets to twentieth-century literary critics—overlook the details of Ovid’s reversal of
causes and retell the story as follows: Apollo sees Daphne, Apollo chases, and then

14
Daphne’s autonomous subjectivity can be viewed as an example of what McKinley reads as Ovid’s effort
to “‘feminize’ [the] treatment of narrative in some sense: to focus on the inner, the subjective, the
psychological,” viii.
11

Daphne flees. Even Arthur Golding’s 1567 translation of the effects of Cupid’s arrows
reads: “t’one causeth love, t’other it doth slake’ (1.566). Yet this is not the order of
Ovid’s lines. When Ovid introduces the arrows that Cupid shoots into Daphne and
Apollo, he writes: “the one compels flight and the other kindles love” (fugat hoc, facit
illud amorem, 469). The eventual consequence of Cupid’s arrows is the chase, but the
structure of this golden line marks Daphne’s flight as prior to Apollo’s love. In addition,
Ovid renders Daphne’s flight as independent from Apollo’s love by isolating the word
“amor” or love with Apollo’s verb “facit,” to kindle. In spite of the zeugma, “amor” is
much more strongly associated with Apollo while Daphne’s fleeing, or “fugat,” remains
separate. Daphne’s flight functions as her own defining and autonomous action that
exists prior to Apollo’s poetic expressions of love as much as it reacts to them.
Accordingly, we might read—against the grain of earlier feminist interpretations—that
Apollo actually becomes a subject when he responds to Daphne’s flight. In Althusser’s
terms of the interpellation of the subject, Daphne’s flight inaugurates Apollo’s
subjectivity since he becomes the pursuer in response to her movement.
In Ovid’s famous use of the hare/hound simile, he punctuates Daphne's
participation in the compelling movement by luring the reader away from the static
position of one who merely watches her flight. With the simile, Ovid invites his readers
into the experience of the chase through the bodies of both the predator and the prey. The
intricacies of the hare/hound simile pull Daphne and Apollo close together in an
exchange of speed. Within this oft-quoted simile, the chase in its entirety demands the
12

attention of the reader as the narrator switches quickly, and sometimes imperceptibly,
between the experiences of the ravenous hound and the barely-escaping hare:
ut canis in vacuo leporem cum Gallicus arvo
vidit, et hic praedam pedibus petit, ille salutem;
alter inhaesuro similis iam iamque tenere
sperat et extento stringit vestigia rostro,
alter in ambiguo est, an sit conprensus, et ipsis
morsibus eripitur tangentiaque ora relinquit:
sic deus et virgo est hic spe celer, illa timore.

Just as when a hound of Gaul sees a hare in an open field, the first makes for his
prey and the other makes for safety; the one, seeming about to clutch him, hopes
now, or now, he has him fast, grazing the heels with his outstretched jaws, while
he, uncertain whether he is already caught, escaping his bite, spurts from the
muzzle reaching out. So the virgin and the god: he, swift by hope, she by fear.
(533-39)

The proximity of the bodies of the two animals is accentuated by the pace of the verse
that corresponds to the alternating lurching and escaping of the animals. Ovid’s verse
also mingles the bodies of the two animals together through the use of only male
pronouns during the first part of the simile to refer to both the hound and the hare.
Accordingly, the actions of the animals merge together in the male pronouns, and the
chase becomes a shared experience that is driven by the hare as much as by the pursuing
hound. At the crucial moment when the simile splits the perspectives from the two male
animals—the hound (canis) and the hare (leporem)—into the gendered perspectives of
the god (dues) and the virgin (virgo), Ovid separates only their motives, but not their
swiftness. At this key moment, Ovid denies one-sided assumptions about the dominance
of the male perspective in the chase and draws readers into the simultaneous perspective
of the fleeing female virgin. By transitioning from the two male pronouns to the two
13

gendered pronouns (hic and illa), the simile forces readers to move between the male
excitement and the female fear that stimulates the chase. Thus, the chase becomes a
competition that involves vying for the subject position in the poetic narrative. This
simile presents the chase as an exchange of energy between the hound and the hare that
allows for the consideration of the power of the female in the chase as well as a
consideration of the compelling competition between the two animals.
Marking Daphne as a female subject who flees, Ovid significantly departs from
other versions of the story that were most likely well-known in Augustan Rome. Similar
to most of the stories in the Metamorphoses, the story of Apollo and Daphne existed in
multiple variants before Ovid immortalized them in his poem. One version, captured in
wall paintings dated from the first century A.D. in Campania, suggests that before Apollo
chases after Daphne, he first tries to woo her while she sits and listens to his singing.
15

According to Peter Knox, “one group of frescoes ignores the pursuit altogether and surely
reflects familiarity with a narrative of the myth independent of Ovid: these paintings
show Apollo, kithara in hand, beside a young woman who appears indifferent to his
attentions.”
16
The stillness of the sitting Daphne suggests that she resists him with the
rigidity of her posture, and the opposition between Apollo and Daphne is clear in their
respective positions as the speaker and the listener. Nowhere in Ovid’s version, however,
does Daphne sit while Apollo approaches her with poetry, and Ovid complicates this
clear opposition between the speaker and the listener with his presentation of Daphne as
always already fleeing. Knox argues that Ovid’s deviation from earlier sources creates

15
Peter Knox, Knox, Peter. “In Pursuit of Daphne,” Transactions of the American Philological Association
(1990):183-202.
16
Knox, 190.
14

the humorous scene of Apollo delivering his poetry “on the run” and demonstrates that
Ovid prioritizes the chase as the key metaphor for addressing the frustrations of love and
poetry.
Yet, like most scholars, Knox ignores the significance of Daphne’s fleeing body.
Ovid specifically transforms Daphne from the sitting listener to the fleeing female.
Therefore, the humor of Apollo’s “running speech” in Ovid results from Daphne’s
control over the chase. She is not simply the passive listener. Instead, she forces Apollo
to repeatedly interrupt his speech with his pleas for her to stop and slow down. In fact,
within Ovid’s poetry, we can hear the effects of Daphne’s flight in Apollo’s breathless
shouts that puff along as he tries to catch his breath: for example the abrupt starts and
stops in his lines—“nympha, precor, Penei, mane! Non insequor hostis; / nympha,
mane!” These lines mimic the shortness of breath caused by Daphne’s perpetual flight.
By veering away from other sources that include a moment before the chase when Apollo
sings and Daphne sits, Ovid revises the expected gender binary of active, male speech
and passive, female silence. He grants Daphne the active role of independent flight.
Ovid replaces the received oppositions between male speech and female silence
with the opposition between male speech and female flight. In light of the primacy of
Daphne’s moving body, the opposition between speech and silence proves an insufficient
method of approaching Ovid’s text. I agree with Lynn Enterline’s argument that:
the perceived opposition between speech and silence . . . does not allow us to
grasp anything new about the complex entanglement of rhetorical figures in the
politics of sexual difference. Rather, such received antimonies as that between
female silence and male speech (an antimony that appeals to intuitive rather than
critical notions of personal agency), betray what is most telling about each of
these texts, deflecting attention away from the way Ovidian rhetoric undoes
15

carefully guarded presumptions about persons, subjectivity, agency, and gender.
17

Enterline proceeds with an analysis of the attention Ovid pays to female modes of
expression and crises of speech involved in the fragmentation, mutilation, and
transformation of female bodies. Encouraged by Enterline but curious about the unique
attention that Ovid pays to Daphne’s body, I direct my analysis to a consideration of how
he disrupts the opposition between male speech and female silence by replacing silence
with motion.
18
As the god of poetry attacks Daphne with words, her response is not the
expected silence of the female victim; instead, her response is flight. Her flight is a form
of resistance against his words rather than merely a sign of her lack of speech. When
Apollo begs Daphne to wait, asks her to slow down, and questions whether she knows his
identity, Ovid does not give Daphne a verbal answer, but he does grant her a clear
response. Ovid’s line reads: “Plura locuturum timido Peneia cursu fugit cumque ipso
verba inperfecta reliquit” (“he would have said more, the timid Penaean [Daphne]
running, she flees and leaves behind his unfinished words,” 525-26). The structure of
Ovid’s line simultaneously ends Apollo’s speech and reintroduces Daphne’s flight,
encouraging a reading of her running as the force that silences him. In effect, her flight
acts as a stronger response than words since it interrupts Apollo’s verbal assault and
indicates a clear denial of his request. Here, Ovid rewrites the binary opposition as male
speech versus female flight.
Ovid’s insistence on Daphne’s flight even after she is transformed into the laurel
tree also distances his story from other lyrics that pose the exclusus amator—shut out

17
Enterline, 17.
18
Other scholars, including Katherine McKinley, also pay almost exclusive attention to the voice of the
female characters as a sign of their subjectivity.
16

lover—against the dura puella—the obstinate girl. Mary Barnard argues that “like the
traditional excluded lover’s conclamatio, Phoebus’ plea for admission” meets with
failure. And even though the closed door—symbol of both the exclusion of the lover and
the mistresses relentless will—is absent, the god finds himself in a very real sense
“locked out” the moment Daphne is transformed into the laurel” (42). What Barnard
does not observe is that Daphne’s persistent movement as much as her bark functions as
the resistant force that separates Apollo from Daphne. Always already fleeing, she
compels her own flight and does not rely on an exterior barrier as her mode of resistance.
This shift away from the tradition of the exclusus amator against the dura puella grants
the female maiden the possibility of protecting her own body according to her
independent desires and movement rather than the desires of the father or husband who
might have authority over the physical barrier of the bark that renders her sexually
unassailable, Daphne’s own flight away (refugit) from Apollo’s embrace of the tree
attributes the power of resistance, at least partially, to her own movement.
Accordingly, Daphne’s fleeing from Apollo, the god of poetry, works as an ironic
dismantling of the goals of poetic persuasion. Ovid’s intense interest in the ironic
potential embedded within the two meanings of the word mouere—to arouse the mind of
a listener and to change the physical location of an object—manifests itself in the scene
of Apollo speaking and Daphne moving.
19
The irony works on two levels in this story.
First, it lies in the fact that Apollo’s specific goal—contrary to the general aims of

19
In her analysis of Ovid’s “rhetoric of the body,” Lynn Enterline points to Ovid’s obsessive attention to
the multiple layers of the word mouere in relationship both to physical movement and the goals of moving
one’s audience when she examines Philomela’s moving tongue. Enterline writes: “in one figure a Roman
commonplace for the aims of rhetorical speech . . ., Ovid tells us that her tongue has motion and that it
“moves” those who listen,” 6.
17

rhetoric—is to get Daphne to stop. If his words move her in the physical sense, then he
defeats his own purpose of moving her mind to consent to his requests. The second level
of irony is that Daphne is moved, not by Apollo’s speech, but rather by her own
independent volition. Her wind-producing movement therefore functions as an ironic
indicator of the failure of Apollo’s oracular powers (suaque illum oracular fallunt, 491)
rather than their success. Since she is already in motion, Apollo cannot possibly claim to
be her mover, and he therefore must suspend the commonplace goals of poetry before he
utters a single word.
20
Essentially, Apollo’s multiple shouts for Daphne to stop (“mane!”
1.504,505) aim to move Daphne—to stir her mind—without moving her body. Yet, Ovid
demonstrates again and again that rhetoric and the body converge within the double
meanings of the word mouere which applies simultaneously in the Metamorphoses to
physical actions of the body and the stirrings of the mind.
When Apollo speaks, the breath of his words—linked by Galen and Aristotle to
the material wind created by the movement of the throat
21
—pales in comparison to the
wind stirred by Daphne’s flight. Ovid makes a direct comparison between the wind of
Apollo’s speech and the wind of Daphne’s flight when he writes that Daphne “flees
swifter than a little breath of air” (fugit ocior aura illa levi, 502-3). By using the word
aura, which commonly referred both to natural breezes and the breath of speech, Ovid
metaphorically describes her breezy speed at the same time that he compares Daphne’s

20
Ovid’s presentation of the irony of this scene also poses the questions: to what extent does proximity
determine the powers of persuasion? Does poetic persuasion depend on the physical arrangement of bodies
as much as on the power of ideas?
21
See Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1999) , 99, for an analysis of how the early moderns incorporated and revised the ideas about the
materiality of the voice that they received from Aristotle and Galen.
18

flight to Apollo’s speech. Hardly the passive listener, Daphne produces her own wind
with her moving body. This emphasis on the wind created by her flight contributes to
Ovid’s project of troubling the received gender oppositions between male speech and
female silence: Daphne may not speak, but her body produces the signifying wind that is
actually swifter than Apollo’s words. Ovid’s comparative adverb, ocior (swifter),
suggests a specific difference between her flight and his speech that challenges the
prioritization of male action over female passivity: most importantly, his speech cannot
keep up with her speed.
Ovid’s insistence on Daphne’s flight marks her as significantly different from
other obstinate and rigid female characters in Roman love poetry.
22
The emphasis on
flight does not merely rehearse the same dynamics between male/pursuer and
female/object that are represented in elegiac poetry. Daphne is often interpreted in
scholarship as rigid, but, as I argue above, Ovid takes pains to demonstrate that Daphne is
anything but—the perpetuity of her flight denotes movability. It also marks her as
troubling for the poetic form that poses the rejected suitor against the obstinate female
who is firm in her resolution against loving advances. Other love conflicts have the
potential for collision between the approaching male and the static female. Daphne, in
contrast, is defined by an action that competes against the male action of advancing.
Daphne’s flight separates her body from Apollo’s lust, and Ovid thereby stresses the
figurative distance between male desire and female sexuality. He signifies the space
between Apollo and Daphne as key for Daphne’s escape.

22
Ovid imports the political resonances of her flight by describing it in terms of the hound metaphor that
mimics the metaphors that describe Hector’s flight from Achilles in Book XXII of Homer’s The Iliad and
Turnus’s flight from Aeneas Book XII of Virgil’s Aeneid .
19

Unlike other female figures of the dura puella, Daphne resists without being rigid.
Ovid thereby suggests that Daphne’s female virginity has something else to it—
something besides simple hardness and impenetrability. Her movement suggests that she
refuses love, but not merely as the binary inferior to Apollo’s assault. Ovid defines
Daphne in terms that make her more than the victim of the pursuit. Her independent
power to move her own body renders her a subject of her own moving desires.

Option of Flight

Ovid’s story of Daphne, the fleeing woman who escapes rape, offers a crucial
alternative to the harrowing rape stories that follow in the Metamorphoses. As the first
story of an attempted rape, Daphne’s plays a pivotal role in establishing expectations for
the stories of sexual assault that dominate Ovid’s poem. Contrary to the claims of many
feminist critics who focus solely on the voice as the apparatus of subjectivity and
resistance to rape, Daphne’s flight begs readers to consider motion as an indicator of
independent desires that combat threats of sexual violence. Scholars such as Lynn
Enterline, Mark Amsler, and Amy Richlin assume that without a voice, a female subject
is rendered a mute object, deprived of subjectivity. As Enterline argues in The Rhetoric
of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare, Ovid’s attention to the lost voices of Philomela,
Io, Callisto, and Acteaon points to crises in speech as central concerns within the
Metamorphoses since the struggle to speak resonates with the efforts of poetic
20

expression. Many stories in the Metamorphoses pivot around moments of lost speech,
but Ovid does not always limit expression to mouths.
In spite of scholarly assumptions about the singular importance of speech, Ovid
piques interest in Daphne’s lost motion rather than her lost voice in his first story of
attempted rape. Even though Daphne uses her voice early in the tale to ask to remain a
virgin, Ovid pays no attention to the loss of her voice in the description of her
transformation. Ovid instead lays emphasis on the loss of Daphne’s swift flight. He
describes how her limbs become heavy and numb, the bark closes over her breast, and
her hair becomes leaves. Here, Ovid makes clear that the key difference between
Daphne’s previous self and her transformed self is the difference in the speed of her
running: “pes modo tam velox pigris radicibus haeret” (“her feet that were so swift were
now fixed slowly as roots,” 551). This singular comparison between Daphne’s former
speed and the slowness of the roots marks her swiftness, as opposed to her voice, as the
quality of Daphne that is most missed.
The importance of Daphne’s lost motion belies assumptions about the primary
significance of voice consciousness as the determinant of subjectivity in the subsequent
stories of rape in the Metamorphoses. Ovid continues to highlight the importance of
flight even in his second story of attempted rape at the same time that he draws attention
to Io’s lost voice. As the story that immediately follows Daphne’s, Io’s story reads as the
first revision of Daphne’s.
23
The beginning of Io’s story mimics Daphne’s: Io’s response
to a god’s attempt at verbal persuasion is flight. Jove yells out to Io: “Ne fuge me!” (“do

23
This immediate revision of his own story suggests that even Ovid himself is compelled to revise the story
in order to try to catch the figure of Daphne.
21

not flee from me,” 596), and the narrator follows immediately with: “fugiebat enim”
(“she was already fleeing,” 596). The imperfect tense of “fugiebat” reveals that Io, like
Daphne, is in the process of flight prior to the god’s command for her to stop.
24
Although
Io’s flight does not enable her escape from rape, her story, nonetheless, accentuates the
role of female flight since the narrator highlights the connection between Jove’s rape of
Io and his ability to stop her flight. The line—“tenuitque fugam rapuitque pudorem” (“he
held the fleeing girl and raped her honor,” 599)—joins the actions of stopping Io’s flight
and raping her so that Jove’s violence against her body is a simultaneous assault on her
virginity and her independent motion. As the victim of rape, Io loses her mobility in a
manner that emphasizes the potency of flight.
The comparison between Daphne and Io becomes even more pronounced when
Ovid interrupts Io’s story with that of another nymph who succeeds in escaping rape
through her Daphne-like flight. In order to slay Argus, who is guarding Io, Mercury tells
the story of Syrinx who flees through the woods away from Pan before she is transformed
into a reed that Pan claims as his instrument in the same way that Apollo claims Daphne
as his tree. Pan’s mimicking of Apollo suggests that nymphs escape rape through flight
when their pursuers are invested in artistic endeavors, establishing flight as a key figure
of resistance against sexual assaults that are linked to poetic expression.
As many scholars have pointed out, this repetition of Daphne’s story in Io’s, in
Syrinx’s, and in the many rape stories that follow, seems to inaugurate a formula for rape
in the Metamorphoses: male sees female, he wants to rape her, she flees, her flight excites

24
Ovid draws attention to the opposite dire circumstance of Philomela’s inability to fly when he writes that
“fugam custodia claudit” (a guard prevents her flight, 6.572).
22

him, and he rapes her. In their readings of the formula, most critics view Ovid as
objectifying the female victim who lacks the voice to claim her own perspective and to
articulate resistance. Daphne and Syrinx, however, are unlike most of the female victims
whose stories follow; they escape rape and establish a precedent according to which the
reader is invited to hope for and expect the possibility of female escape from male
assaults. I argue that, by including female flight, Ovid actually suspends the climax of
the rape and invites alternative modes of reading.
The fantasy of independence and freedom in female flight peaks in the story that
Venus tells to Adonis of Atalanta in Book X.
25
In this story, female speed defines female
beauty but it also acts as the method through which an exceptionally fast maiden controls
her own sexual destiny. Atalanta’s story accentuates the independent female desires that
are embedded in the story of Daphne’s initial flight. In reaction to a prophecy that states
that Atalanta should shun marriage, Atalanta takes charge over her own sexuality and
contrives a challenge to prevent the many men who seek her from achieving her bed.
26

She transforms the plot of the fleeing woman and the chasing rapist into a contest over
which she has complete control.
27
She tells the men that in order to have her they must
beat her in a foot race. Clearly a revision of Daphne’s story, Atalanta’s race transforms
the story of male pursuit into the story of a race in which the fleeing maiden not only
thwarts male desires but clearly determines the progression of the narrative. Flight

25
See McKinley’s examination of Atalanta’s independence in xxiv, xxvii, 43.
26
Anderson notes that “we might be tempted to read this dilemma as Ovid’s poetic representation of the
universal dilemma of the woman (or man) in love: she must “die” as an independent puella in order to
become a wife,” qutd in McKinley, 46.
27
Katherine McKinley reports that in “Apollodorus and Hyginus Atalanta, a Diana-figure, pursues each
suitor on the track with a spear and murders him,” 43.
23

provides a method for establishing female mastery over the rhetorical and physical terms
of her own desires.
Any reading of Ovid’s Metamorphoses must grapple with his sustained interest in
the independent agency of female figures who escape patriarchal efforts to limit their
movements or freedom. Contrary to the claims of feminist critics who group all of the
rape stories together to demonstrate how they objectify the female body, Ovid
differentiates the stories of rape along key lines of resistance. The power of the female
body to undermine the gods’ attempts at rape lingers throughout Ovid’s seamless song
after Daphne’s initial escape from Apollo’s pursuit. Ovid’s stories invite readers to
negotiate a female subjectivity as he repeats and revises the trope of the fleeing female
even within his own text.

Sprinting Ahead

The early modern poets and dramatists examined in the following chapters take
up Ovid’s invitation to attend to the subjectivity of females in flight. Each poet and
dramatist imagines Daphne fleeing farther or faster than Ovid allows in his story, freeing
the fleeing woman from the limitations of the laurel tree. Chapter Two is inspired by the
staging of Daphne bursting forth from the laurel tree in the entertainments for Elizabeth I
during her progress to Sudeley Castle in 1591. The physicality of the bodies of the
performers and the audience enables Daphne to seize control over her flight and its
interpretations. As she escapes the tree and runs toward Queen Elizabeth, the Sudeley
24

Daphne’s fleeing body accentuates her independent desires; her flight toward “the queen
of chastity” turns away from the limitations of patriarchal poetry as it remembers
Daphne’s autonomous ambitions to live as a virgin like Diana.
Chapter Three offers an analysis of Edmund Spenser’s Florimell, the best-known
image of the fleeing woman in early English poetry, who is all the more compelling
because she follows the literary footsteps of both the Ovidian nymph and her Elizabethan
counterparts in court entertainments such as the one at Sudeley Castle. Florimell runs so
fast and far that she escapes even the stalling forces of Ovidian metamorphosis. By
rejecting the metamorphosis of the fleeing woman into the laurel tree, Spenser both
redefines chastity as an active virtue and refashions the relationship between the poet and
the female body.
My analysis in Chapter Four returns to a dramatic embodiment of the story of
Apollo and Daphne. It examines the direct allusion to Ovid’s story as a stage direction
for the Athenian lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As they chase each other in
imitation of Apollo and Daphne repeatedly across the stage, the actors playing the
Athenian lovers embody the terms of the chase that trouble expectations about passive
females and active males. I prove that Helena’s connections to Daphne do not restrict her
to the object position in the chase—rather they accentuate her autonomy and impressive
volition.
While the chapters on sixteenth-century texts explore how writers make a virtual
project of setting literary women in flight, the final epilogue examines how seventeenth-
century poets such as Thomas Carew and Philo-Philippa take the figure one step further
25

by asserting a stronger identification with the fleeing woman than with her pursuer, the
god of poetry. This last chapter also looks forward to how female poets revise and
enliven the story of Daphne for distinctly feminist and homosocial purposes. I argue that
the process of expanding the imaginative boundaries of the fleeing female in early
modern poetry opens up space for feminist writers to re-examine and reclaim female
agency in early modern texts.

26

Chapter Two
Running Toward Elizabeth:
Female Subjectivity and Daphne in the 1591 Entertainments at Sudeley

On the Sunday of her visit to Sudeley Castle in 1591, Elizabeth witnessed a
performance by local subjects that began with “Apollo running after Daphne,” followed
by a shepherd who declared that he loved Daphne, but Apollo chased her, and she was
turned into a tree.
28
After the Shepherd’s announcement of his desire for Apollo to die
and for Daphne to return to her “olde shape,” “her Maiesty sawe Apollo with the tree”
and then listened to Apollo sing a sonnet for Daphne.
29

Immediately after, Elizabeth
witnessed what must have been one of the more spectacular moments of the performance:
for when “the song ended, the tree riued and Daphne issued out, [and] Apollo ran after
her.” The printed record of the performance then states that “Daphne, running to her
Maiesty, vttred this: ‘I stay, for whether should chastety fly for succour, but to the
Queene of chastety. By thee [Apollo] was I enterred in a tree, that by crafte, way might
be made to lust, by your highnes restored, that by vertue, there might be assurance in
honor.’ ”
The Sudeley performance’s fascination with the figure of Daphne is hardly
unique, but its dramatization of Daphne riving forth out of the tree marks a significant

28
This account of the Queen’s progress is printed in Speeches Delivered to Her Maiestie This Last
Progresse, (Oxford, 1592), B-Biii. I have consulted Huntington Library copy as well as the version
reprinted in The Complete Works of John Lyly, R. Warwick Bond, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1902). Bond attributes the authorship of the entertainment to John Lyly.
29
The sonnet was later printed as “Apollo’s loue song for faire Daphne” in Englands Helicon 1600,
London, Printed for John Flasket, rpt as fascimile by Scholar Press Limited (London, 1973).
27

and, I argue, feminist departure from earlier revisions of Daphne’s story. The story of
Apollo and Daphne is a commonplace in early modern literature on account of Daphne’s
associations with the laurels of poetic triumph. Poets repeatedly feature the “chase” of
Daphne in their poems, attempting to “fix” the meaning of Daphne’s flight and
metamorphosis in order to advertise their ability to possess the laurels; catching Daphne
means capturing poetic glory. In early modern England, however, the poetic impulse to
catch the figure of Daphne is complicated by the authority of the unmarried, female
monarch. At the Sudeley performance, in particular, Elizabeth’s physical presence gives
wings to Daphne’s flight; with the queen seated in the audience and named as the power
that frees her from the tree, Daphne is able to run toward female-centered desires instead
of away from rapacious male pursuers. In other words, the queen’s presence extends the
imaginative boundaries of Daphne’s flight.
30

This chapter argues that by writing Elizabeth into Daphne’s myth the Sudeley
performance wrests the story of female chastity away from the male poetic tradition and
reclaims it for the sphere of female authority. The radical Sudeley revision of Daphne’s
story depends upon the imaginative possibility of a shared female experience of chastity
that is enabled by the embodied presence of the queen. My examination of how the
performance aligns Elizabeth with the fictional figure of Daphne is unprecedented in
early modern scholarship. Even though the nymph is the primary representative of

30
While I discovered the text of the Sudeley performance via my independent research on the figure of
Daphne, much of my analysis shares the interests of Louis Montrose. He also considers how Elizabeth’s
authority alters the course of Ovidian allusions. He writes “the deployment of Ovidian, Petrarchan, and
allegorical romance modes by late Elizabethan writers must be read in terms of an intertextuality that
includes both the discourse of European literary history and the discourse of Elizabethan state power,” The
Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and The Cultural Politics of Elizabethan Theatre (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1996), 159.
28

Elizabeth’s prized virtue for most of the performance, most scholars of the Sudeley
entertainments follow Louis Montrose’s lead and consider only how the performance
casts Elizabeth into the divine role of Diana.
31
They note how naming Elizabeth the
“queene of chastety” reiterates a long-standing iconographic association between
Elizabeth and the Roman goddess of chastity.
32
Even scholars interested in the landscape
and the laurel tree tend to overlook the dramatization of Daphne’s suffering, her
metamorphosis, and her sprint away from Apollo.
33
Elizabeth’s power may come from
her equation with Diana, but Daphne’s reference to herself in the third person as
“chastety” and her naming of Elizabeth as the “queene of chastety” warrants more
analytic attention to the connections between Elizabeth/Diana and Daphne.
By attending to the performance’s staging of the female relationship between
Daphne and Elizabeth, this chapter also challenges the notion that celebrations of
Elizabeth’s monarchical power depended on what Louis Montrose defines as her
“difference from other women.” He asserts that Elizabeth’s self-promotion did not aim to

31
See “‘Eliza, Queene of Shepheardes,’ and the Pastoral of Power,” English Literary Renaissance 10
(1980), 168-80. Montrose writes that “Elizabeth is the queen of this pastoral and the sylvan domain; she
incarnates Diana, to whom Ovid’s Daphne is votary . . . the Queen’s virtuous magic derives from a kind of
matriarchal virginity; her powers transcend those of the lustful and paternal pagan gods,” 173. Montrose
reiterates this focus on the connection between Elizabeth and Diana when he re-incorporates this analysis in
The Purpose of Playing, 158.
32
I argue that the Sudeley performance adds a layer of compleixity to the long-standing connections
between Elizabeth and Diana in other court performances.
33
Since both Susan Wofford and William Leahy access the Sudeley performance via engagement with
Montrose’s compelling analyses, they also continue the analytic tradition of ignoring the relationship
between Elizabeth and Daphne. Wofford uses Montrose’s analysis to propose how Elizabeth’s power is
tied to the English landscape, considering Daphne only as the tree instead of as the embodied nymph. See
Susan Wofford, The Choice of Achilles: The Ideology of Figure in Epic (Stanford: Stanford U Press, 1992),
354. Even Leahy, who criticizes Montrose’s failure to consider the critical audience at Elizabethan pageant
performances, overlooks the connection that the Sudeley performance establishes between Elizabeth and
the subject who plays the role of Daphne. See William Leahy, Elizabethan Triumphal Processions
(Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, 2005), 40-43.
29

“undermine the masculine hegemony of her society.”
34
Even though Montrose argues
convincingly that Elizabeth sought to mitigate the threat of female rule by representing
herself as the exceptional woman, the performance at Sudeley demonstrates that her
subjects were nonetheless interested in how she belonged to the general category of
woman. I argue that isolating the queen and the fictional nymph in a scene of intimate
exchange has the potential of “galvanizing women’s identity as a subordinate group with
common interests.”
35
Stimulating the intersections of the political and the literary, this
chapter utilizes the work of earlier feminists who encourage investigations of alternative
readings of how the female monarch prompted drastic and female-centered revisions to
traditional narratives.
36
I argue that by proposing an alliance between Elizabeth and
Daphne, the Sudeley performance constructs a complex female subjectivity that depends
on the interaction between two women, a subjectivity that extends beyond the limited
qualities of the exceptional monarch or fictional character.

34
Montrose writes that “the emphasis upon her difference from other women seems to have been designed,
in part, to neutralize the appearance of such a threat; it was a strategy for personal survival and political
legitimation within a soical and political culture that was pervasively patriarchal,” Purpose, 153.
35
Mihoko Suzuki uses this phrase in the context of the early seventeenth-century pamphlet debates. She
focuses on how “Elizabeth’s long reign constitutes an important historical circumstance of this debate.” I
import the phrase here to invite Suzuki’s ideas into a discussion of how the debates about gender during
Elizabeth’s reign also had the effect of invigorating the bonds between women. In “Elizabeth, Gender and
the Political Imaginary,” in Debating Gender in Early Modern England, 1500-1700, eds. Cristina
Malcolmson and Mikoko Suzuki (New york: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 231-253.
36
My interest in the relationship between Elizabeth and her female subjects within the context of Ovidian
mythology looks back to the seminal work of feminist critics such as Philippa Berry. In her analysis of the
relationship between chastity and power in Elizabeth’s reign, Berry proposes that “Elizabeth’s presence on
the English throne for forty-four years certainly did not end the patriarchal structure of English society;
none the less, in certain respects it was a radical event—and in Elizabethan literature, it was increasingly
perceived as such.” Berry also notes that Renaissance scholarship was able to “displace the fundamental
problem of the queen’s gender” by emphasizing her difference from other women, 61-65. Philippa Berry,
Of Chastity and Power (London: Routledge, 1989).
30

Chastity, the Queen, and the Tree

The dramatization of the story of Daphne’s transformation situates the Sudeley
performance in the midst of debates concerning female sexuality in general and
Elizabeth’s virginity in particular. In 1591, Elizabeth was sixty years old and well
beyond child-bearing; thus, Daphne stands in as an apt figure for Elizabeth since her
metamorphosis could be read as visible proof of her chosen virginity. Many of
Elizabeth’s published speeches echo the same kinds of sentiments voiced by Daphne
against marriage and motherhood. In as early as 1588, Elizabeth commanded parliament,
“charge me not with the want of children”
37
in lines that echo Daphne’s plea to her father,
“graunt me while I live my maidenhead for to have.” I do not propose that Elizabeth
intended to cite Daphne when she proclaimed her own desire to remain unmarried, but
the similarity between Elizabeth’s speeches and Daphne’s requests to remain a virgin in
Ovid’s poetry surely prompted the devisers of the Sudeley performance to dramatize her
story. The figures of Daphne and the tree most likely put Elizabeth and her fellow
audience in mind of a number of early modern interpretations that are worth rehearsing
here since they inform the significance of the Sudeley revision. The prop of the laurel tree
in the Sudeley performance associates Elizabeth’s virtue with the inviolability of
Daphne’s body, yet whether Daphne signals praise or condemnation of Elizabeth’s
virginity depends upon the various traditions of reading Daphne in moral, political, and
poetic texts.

37
qutd in Berry, 66.
31

Many early modern poets praise the strength of Daphne’s chastity by viewing her
treefication as a reward from the gods. They continue the tradition of medieval
commentators who, as Christine Rees argues, often depict the tree as a “new and steadfast
state” that allows Daphne to continue to live as a virgin, invulnerable to sexual assault.
38

From this perspective, Daphne might lose her humanness, but she gains the benefit of an
eternity of her chosen virginity within the protection of the tree. The on-stage tree is thus
an apt offering to Elizabeth, a symbol of the award she deserves for her own purity and
commendable virginity. Published twelve years prior to the Sudeley performance in
1579, the “April Eclogue” of Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender, participates
in the tradition of praising Elizabeth by offering her Daphne’s “bay braunches” that are
“all for Elisa in her hand to weare” (104-105).
39
The bay branches tie Elizabeth’s
triumphs to her dedication to virginity, a reminder of the intersection between politics and
sexuality in encomiastic devotions to Elizabeth.
In 1567, the ninth year of Elizabeth’s reign, Arthur Golding’s English translation
of Ovid’s Metamorphoses praises Daphne’s metamorphosis into the laurel as proof of the
value of female chastity. Golding follows the lead of the medieval commentators and
presents Daphne’s tale as a text with “apt and playne/ Instructions which import the
prayse of vertues, and the shame/ Of vices, with the due rewardes of eyther of the
same.”
40
Golding describes Daphne’s transformation into the laurel as the reward that

38
Christine Rees, “The Metamorphosis of Daphne in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry,”
The Modern Language Review, 66:2 (April, 1971), 251-263.
39
Citations of Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender from Edmund Spenser: The Shorter Poems, ed.
Richard A. McCabe (London: Penguin, 1999).
40
Golding, 407.
32

she purchases with her virtue. The tree becomes the sign of the everlasting recognition
of her integrity. He summarizes her story for his reader, writing,
in the tale of Daphnee turnd to Bay,
A myrror of virginitie appeare unto us may,
Which yeelding neyther unto feare, nor force, nor flatterye,
Doth purchace everlasting fame and immortalitye.
41

A Calvinist, Golding nonetheless follows the Catholic tendency to set Daphne up as a
model of female virtue on account of her metamorphosis. The tree serves as the ultimate
symbol of the virtue of not yielding to fear, force, or flattery.
By contrast, other poets lay claim to the image of Daphne for the opposite
purpose of condemning the Catholic value of celibacy. They denigrate the tree,
representing Daphne’s transformation as a form of punishment for her fear of chaste
affection and her excessive pride in her virginity. From this perspective, Daphne suffers
the loss of humanity and the ability to procreate when the tree overwhelms her body. The
tree becomes proof that her devotion to virginity is a punishable vice.
42
First published
four years after the Sudeley performance, Spenser’s Sonnet XXVIII in his Amoretti
revises the story of Daphne’s transformation with the specific purpose of stressing that
Daphne’s scorn for “Pheabus louely fyre” earned her the punishment of transformation.
The offense of her excessive pride in her virginity was so great that the “gods in theyr
reuengefull yre/ did her transforme into a laurell tree” (11-12). In the Amoretti, Daphne’s

41
ibid.
42
Elizabeth’s sterility is scorned in a manner similar to Daphne’s. Helen Hacket writes that the Catholic
polemicist Nicholas Sander’s The Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism (1595) construes Elizabeth’s
“physical sterility . . . as a punishment for spiritual sterility.” She cites Sander’s explanation that “it was
the will of God that Henry VIII, for his sins and for the schism, should be thus severely punished: for
though when he died he left three children living—Edward, Mary, and Elizabeth—yet none of them might
a child be corn and reared,” qutd in Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1995), 132.
33

resistance to Phoebus’s amorous pursuits is so offensive that it warrants the gods’ wrath.
Within this context, Elizabeth might have been forced to view Daphne’s entrapment
within the tree as a sign of the potential negative consequences for her own devotion to
virginity.
43
Displaying the tree in front of Elizabeth might serve as a warning that, like
Daphne, she is subject to the anger of the gods for her resistance to male suitors.
The proclivity of progress entertainments to offer advice to the queen on issues of
domestic, foreign, and/or personal affairs would have prepared Elizabeth to anticipate
unfavorable critiques of her marital and/or procreative status at Sudeley Castle. As much
as the progresses displayed Elizabeth’s power over her land, they also offered her
subjects the opportunity to prey upon her attention. Jayne Elisabeth Archer and Sarah
Knight describe many progress entertainments during which the queen was “required to
play her part and listen to the advice of her people.
44
” They note that the plans for the
Kennilworth performances in 1575 insisted “on the queen's duty of marriage: Iris's
speech complacently announces that Elizabeth 'shall find much greater cause to followe
Juno than Dyana'.”
45
The Kennilworth entertainment therefore established a precedent
for imploring the queen to end her unproductive association with the goddess of chastity.
Another court entertainment at the Tilt-Yard on November 17, 1590, a Herald alludes to
Elizabeth’s resistance to love as part of his praise for her beauty. Referring to the queen,
he reads, “there is a Ladie that scornes Loue and his power, of more vertue and greater

43
Hackett locates disillusionment with the queen specifically in the 1590’s when “panegyric becomes
progressively divided between increasingly extravagant professions of devotion to the Queen, and oblique
expressions of dissent and disillusionment, which in turn make iconographic use of the incipient fractures
between the diverse aspects of Elizabeth as Queen and woman,” 166.
44
Jayne Elisabeth Archer and Sarah Knight, “Elizabetha Triumphans” in The Progresses, Pageants, and
Entertainments of Queen Elizabeth I, Jayne Elisabeth Archer, Elizabeth Goldring, and Sarah Knight, eds.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 4.
45
qutd in Leslie, 55.
34

bewtie than all the Amorouse Dames that be at this day in the worlde.”
46
The initial
staging of Daphne’s treeification and subsequent re-emergence into the fearful flight
away from Apollo repeats this theme of praise for Elizabeth within the context of her
scorn of love. It also joins in the implied critique of Elizabeth’s stale sexuality.
Like the debates surrounding Elizabeth’s sexuality, the conflicting representations
of the moral significance of Daphne’s transformation are more complex than the praise/
condemnation binary.
47
The tendency of some early modern poetic readings to limit the
strength of the nymph’s chastity to the strength of the tree’s bark adds a complicated
strand to the web of responses to Ovid’s story. By insisting that Daphne is chaste only as
the tree, poets often occlude the possibility that Daphne’s female body can escape from
the bark and retain her chastity. In Golding’s epistle (cited above) it is the bay as much
as Daphne’s virtue that “doth purchace everlasting fame and immortalitye.”
48
The poem
“The Praise of Chastity,” published only two years after the performance at Sudeley in
the 1593 collection entitled The Phoenix Nest, limits female chastity to the tree at the
same time that it suggests that the female body itself is prone to lascivious lust. It equates
Daphne’s virtue with the laurel tree in its final lines,
so flowreth vertue like the laurell tree,
Immortall greene, that euerie eie may see,
And well was Daphne turnd into the bay,
Whose chastnes triumphes, growes, & liues for ay.

46
Masques: Performed before Queen Elizabeth, 1820. Reprinted in The Complete Works of John Lyly v.1
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902),.410.
47
Katherine McKinley motivates a complex investigation that resists “either/or” approaches. She writes,
“In considering the way Ovid and particularly his later readers read the feminine, for example, I have not
found the “praise or blame” (Mary/Eve) hurmeneutic to be adequate to represent the full diversity of
readings they represent,” Reading the Ovidian Heroine, p. xxii.
48
Golding, cited above.
35

The interpretation of Ovid’s story of Daphne in this poem implies that her chastity “lives”
perpetually only on account of her change into the tree. The poem therefore suggests that
without the metamorphosis, Daphne’s virtue could not withstand male assaults.
This assumption is confirmed by the fact that in the Sudeley performance Daphne
is subjected to Apollo’s violent chase as soon as she re-emerges from the tree. The
reversed metamorphosis, for which the queen is held responsible, momentarily unleashes
a second threat of rape. For as soon as Apollo sees that Daphne is freed from the tree, he
resumes his chase after her body. In other words, both the poem “The Praise of
Chastity” and the Sudeley performance support the notion that Daphne’s body is always
already at risk of falling victim to Apollo’s rapacious pursuits. Accustomed to poems
such as “The Praise of Chastity,” the audience members at Sudeley could have assumed
that it is only as the “bay” that Daphne’s chastity lives eternally; the primary indicator of
the strength of Daphne’s chastity is the god’s decision to reward her with transformation
into the laurel. Stepping out of the laurel therefore renders her chastity suspect.
This anonymous poem also indirectly implies that the value of her chastity is not
sufficiently indicated by her own petition for her father to allow her to remain unmarried
nor from the intensity of her flight away from lust. In fact, the poem omits any direct
reference to Daphne’s human body prior to her transformation. Instead, the poem
presents two distinct female forms: the chaste tree and the human whore. The poem
severs the narrative connection between the nymph and the laurel tree; the chaste female
body that enables Daphne to run away in Ovid’s tale is entirely absent from the Phoenix
36

Nest poem. Prior to the final lines in praise of the chaste bay, the poem includes its only
description of a flesh-and-blood female body as a
faire alluring face,
A lustie girle, y clad in queint aray,
Whose daintie hand, makes musicke with hir lace,
And tempts thy thoughts, and steales thy sense away.
Whose ticing haire, like nets of golden wyre,
Enchaine thy hart, whose gate and voice diuine,
Enflame thy blood, and kindle thy desire,
Whose features wrap and dazle humaine eine.

The human female body is only soft and alluring, the opposite of the impenetrable form
of the chaste bay. Yet both the chaste tree and the alluring face are inspired by the
singular figure of Ovid’s Daphne. The poem offers two distinct forms directly descended
from Daphne: first, the moving female body that bears a striking resemblance to the way
that Apollo sees Daphne in Ovid’s tale, and second, the chaste laurel tree. The
incontinent female in “The Praise of Chastity” has “ticing hair, like nets of golden wyre,”
that kindles desire and “dazle[s] [the] humaine eine.”
49
But the idea of female chastity
resides only in the form of the tree. The laurel in the early modern imagination of this
anonymous poet therefore stands out as a mode of existence superior to the flesh of the
female body since it is supposedly less alluring, more constant, and sexually inviolable.
Readings that emphasize the need for the tree to protect Daphne’s chastity
reinforce notions of the weakness of the female body. The staging of Daphne’s
experience in the first part of the Sudeley performance presents the female body as
especially vulnerable. Even though Daphne, the primary representative of chastity in the

49
This image appears in praise for Elizabeth in the Entertainment at Cowdray in 1591 in “A Dittie” that
begins, “Behold her lockes like wiers of beaten gold, / her eies like starres that twinkle in the skie,/ Her
heauenly face not framd of earthly molde,/Her voice that sounds Apollos melodies...” in Bond, Warwick,
ed. The Complete Works of John Lyly, 423.
37

performance, eventually revises the story and finds safety in Elizabeth’s presence, she
suffers multiple attacks before she seeks protection from the “Queene of Chastety.”
During the first half of the performance, the audience, including Elizabeth, watches the
flight of the fearful Daphne away from the would-be rapist Apollo, listens to the
Shepherd’s account of her dehumanizing entrapment within the tree, and witnesses the
attempted disfigurement of that tree at the hands of the poet-god Apollo. The repeated
assaults on Daphne pose a reminder to Elizabeth of the vulnerability of her own female
body. I argue that the fact that Apollo resumes his violent pursuit of Daphne as soon as
she emerges out of the tree stresses to Elizabeth that the female body must be ever-
vigilant against rape as well as assaults of male poets. In addition, the second chase
demands that Elizabeth notice that it takes the intervention of monarchical authority for
Daphne to find safety.
This message was especially apt for Elizabeth who shared Daphne’s need to be
vigilant about the ever-present threat of assaults on her moving body while she was on
progresses through the countryside. In her analysis of recorded attempts to harm the
queen during her travels, Mary Hill Cole cites many examples of the “awkward reality
that progresses increased her vulnerability.” Two specific examples attribute the plans of
would-be assassins to the ease of approaching the queens body on progress.

Cole reports
that “for two assassins, Elizabeth’s progress into Wiltshire in 1592 seemed an
‘opportunietie fitt for this practise’” and “the next year Robert Parsons and Gilbert Laton
conspired to murder the Queen ‘and sheweth howe yt my be performed—her matie being
38

in the progress.’”
50
In other words, the queen’s decision to remove her court to the
country was interpreted by more than one Elizabethan subject as opening herself up
carelessly to attack. One “malcontent noted, ‘for she taketh no care of her going.’”
51
Her
guards and protected transporte indicated her susceptibility to attack as much as her
security.
Many performances for Elizabeth capitalized on the theme of the queen’s
vulnerability on progresses. Michael Leslie explains that when Elizabeth was outdoors
for progress entertainments, “never would she know when a savage man or woodland
nymph would emerge into her path; never could she predict the drama into which she was
inevitably to take the essential and central role, even when she had little to say or do.”
52

For example, upon her approach to Bisham, the queen encountered a “wild man” who
told the story of how Elizabeth’s presence made his “untamed thoughts waxe gentle.”
53

His lines testify to the calming strength of her physical body, but they also allude to the
existence of “untamed thoughts” in the minds of her subjects. His praise depends upon a
reminder of the wildness that lurks beyond the verge of her presence.
54

50
Mary Hill Cole, “Monarchy in Motion,” in The Progresses, Pageants, and Entertainment of Queen
Elizabeth I, eds. Jayne Elisabeth Archer, Elizabeth Goldring, and Sarah Knight, (Oxford: Oxford, 2007),
28-45.
51
Cole, 42.
52
Michael Leslie, “‘Something Nasty in the Wilderness’: Entertaining Queen Elizabeth on her Progresses,”
Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England: An Annual Gathering of Research, Criticism and Reviews,
10 (1998), 66.
53
Speeches Delivered to Her Maiestie This Last Progresse, (Oxford, 1592), ln 473.
54
According to Laneham’s Letter, one record of the Kennilworth Entertainments, one vigorous
performance before Elizabeth presented a very real threat to the monarch when the actor broke a branch
that then almost hit Elizabeth’s head. Gina Bloom explains that “the Letter narrates how after the Savage
Man, played by Gascoigne, completed his speeches, he attempted to show ‘submission’ to the Queen, most
likely by bowing. But in the process of taking his bow, he mistakenly ‘brake hiz tree a sunder.’ or broke
his staff. The Letter narrator tells of how the top of the staff then flew off, almost hitting Elizabeth’s horse
on the head and causing the horse to become ‘startld.’ While the others, including one gentleman ‘mooch
dismayed,’ tried desperately to bring order to the debacle, calming the horse and attending to Elizabeth.”
39

Elizabeth’s progresses also opened her body up to the same kind of troubling
associations between female movement and female incontinency at the heart of debates
about Daphne’s metamorphosis. Cole describes the “scandalmongering about the real
purpose of Elizabeth’s frequent progresses”:
In Ipswich, a citizen claimed that Elizabeth ‘looked like one lately come out of
childbed’; about her progress in 1564, ‘some say she is pregnant and is going
away to lie in.’ Another rumor asserted that ‘Lord Robert hath had fyve children
by the Quene, and she never goeth in progresse but to be delivered.’
55

Elizabeth therefore had firsthand knowledge of how movement away from the enclosed
protection of the court could open her body to uncontrolled interpretations. The
mythologies and debates surrounding both Elizabeth and Daphne likely mingled quite
freely in the imaginations of the audience at Sudeley. By asking Elizabeth to identify or
at least sympathize with Daphne’s plight, the entertainment offers Elizabeth the
opportunity to relate her own vulnerability in terms that group her with the category of
other women. Her role as Diana requires that she acknowledge the connection between
herself and the subjects who share her female experience.

Refusing to be Written

At the same time that she runs toward Elizabeth, the actress playing Daphne turns
her back on Apollo and what he represents to the early modern imagination. What
Daphne’s embodied flight in the Sudeley performance disrupts most directly is the

Gina Bloom, Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England (Philadelphia:
Penn, 2007), 192.
55
Cole, 44.
40

tradition of the Petrarchan appropriation of her story. Just before Daphne rives out of the
tree, the actor playing this Petrarchan Apollo sings the last lines of his sonnet which
declare his intention to “engraue upon this tree, Daphne’s perfection/That neither men
nor gods, can force affection” (13-14). At this moment in the performance, the actor
playing Apollo most likely turns to disfigure the tree. The cue for Daphne to free herself
from the confines of the laurel is thus the poet’s move to write upon her treeified body.
Although Daphne’s subsequent issuing out of the tree works clearly as physical proof of
Apollo’s concluding aphorism “that neither men nor gods can force affection,” it also
figures as a rejection of the Petrarchan mode of penning the female body. Daphne flees
from Apollo’s attempt to reduce her body to engraved, static words.
Petrarch’s struggle to capture poetic glory as well as his beloved Laura, whose
name simultaneously invokes the laurels of poetry and Daphne’s transformation, is well-
rehearsed in Elizabethan court performances. In fact, Elizabeth encouraged courtly love
poems that figures her as the elusive woman who escapes the pursuits of her romantic
and political suitors. in spite of the fact that Elizabeth invited it, this tradition was largely
closed to the role of active female agent of authority. Philippa Berry asserts that “it was
as the unattainable object of masculine desire that Elizabeth was represented.” She
explains the limitations that poetry imposed on Elizabeth since “representations of
Elizabeth . . . effectively deny that independent self-determination which had presumably
motivated her to remain unmarried . . . she [became one of] the passive vehicles of
masculine fantasy.”
56
Any invocation of Daphne in 1591 responds to the Petrarchan
traditions as well as to the political framing of Elizabeth as an elusive lover. The

56
Berry, 62.
41

popularity of the Petrarchan mode in progress entertainments in 1591 is evident in the
Elvetham entertainments when a poet approaches Elizabeth, wearing “a laurel garland on
his head to expresse that Apollo was patrone of his studies.” he courts Elizabeth with his
poetry and begs her to “grace me with a looke,/ Or from my browes this Laurell wreath
will fall,/ And I unhappy die amidst my song.” The Sudeley performance shuns such
Petrarchan lovers who, Apollo-like, limit Elizabeth to the position of the love-object.
Instaed, the Sudeley revision identifies a strikingly new role for the chaste female that
reaffirms her independent subjectivity.
While the Ovidian Apollo reacts to Daphne’s metamorphosis
by announcing that “if you cannot be my wife you shall be my tree” (“'at, quoniam
coniunx mea non potes esse, arbor eris certe' dixit 'mea! 557-8), the Sudeley Apollo
resembles the Petrarchan lover who is immobilized by the loss of his beloved and equates
it with the loss of his poetic faculties. He descends clearly from the long line of early
modern Petrarchan lovers as much as from Ovid’s god of poetry. In the Sudeley
Shepherd’s narrative account of Daphne’s transformation into the tree, Apollo is as
“enchanted as wounded with her losse, or his owne crueltye” (30-31). Unlike the
Ovidian Apollo who triumphantly gathers Daphne’s leaves, the Sudeley Apollo is
enthralled in mystical rapture by the pain of his loss. The Shepherd says that he himself
was “turned into a stone,” echoing the many instances in the Rime Sparse where the
Petrarchan lover declares that the elusive female causes his own immobilization as he is
turned into “an almost living and terrified stone” (23.81). Meanwhile, the Sudeley
Apollo’s “fingers, which were wonte to play on the lute, found no other instrument then
42

his owne face; the goulden haire, the pride of his heade, pulde off in lockes, and stampts
at his feets; his sweete voice, turned to howling; and there sitteth he (long may he
sorrowe) wondring and weeping, and kissing the lawrell, his late love” (31-35). Like
Petrarch’s lover who is “mad with grief” in poem 43, the Sudeley Apollo laments his loss
instead of claiming poetic triumph.
What Daphne rejects when she turns away from the Petrarchan Apollo are the
efforts of the poet to lay hold of the beloved in words before she can escape or refuse
him. In Petrarch’s poems, including poem 29, the lover laments his inability to “enclose
her praises in verse” exposing a complicated relationship between writing verses on the
female body and restricting her movement. In the same poem, the lover asks, “what cell
of memory is there that can contain all the virtue, all the beauty that one sees who looks
in her eyes” (29.51-55, italics mine); he searches for a metaphorical space that can
enclose the memory of the female beloved. Poem 50 continues the idea of limiting the
elusive female’s beauty within an artistic medium. The lover remembers the first time he
saw his beloved Laura and his eyes were so “fixed on her lovely face, to sculpture it for
imagination in a place whence it would never be moved by any art or force” (poem
50.65-69). The goal is to “sculpture” her beauty, to render it in a solidified form that
prevents her movement or alteration. For Petrarch, the act of writing aspires to enclose,
fix, and stabilize the objects of poetry even if words are destined to repeated failure. The
elusive female may escape Apollo, the god of poetry, but the Petrarchan lover displays
his own poetic prowess by trapping her image in words again and again within the
bounds of his poem.
43

The Rime Sparse aims specifically to “fix” Daphne’s meaning through the
repetition of the image of Daphne disappearing into the laurel. For even though her story
is one of perpetual escape from capture, the description of her image in the written word
throughout Petrarch’s poem forces upon her a type of stability: she is always already
fleeing from the time of Ovid’s Metamorphoses up to the moment of her rebirth in
Petrarch’s poems. Mary Barnard explains that the Petrarchan lover attempts to “bring
Daphne into the present—transcending time and fixing her in an eternal now.”
57
Daphne
may be elusive, but she never ceases to be elusive in Petrarch’s poems: her escape is
made constant by his repetition.
When Daphne appears in the Rime Sparse, she is always figured at the moment of
disappearance into the laurel tree. Petrarch’s readers consistently get just a glimpse of
Daphne, realizing her presence in the poem exclusively at the point when she recedes into
the tree. The lover in Poem 22 invokes Daphne only when he expresses the hope that his
beloved will not be like the ever-receding Daphne; he begs, “let her not be transformed
into a green wood/ to escape from my arms, as the day/ when Apollo pursued her down
here on earth” (34-36). Petrarch’s beloved exists solely in relationship to the laurel that
she becomes. Sara Sturm-Maddox explains that for Petrarch’s Daphne-like Laura
“elements of the feminine figure are interchangeable with those of her arboreal
equivalent.”
58
Daphne has no existence independent of the laurels in Petrarch’s poetry.

57
As Mary Barnard argues, “Petrarch wishes to evoke [a] sense of timelessness when he selects the modest
Daphne, the mythical beloved, to recreate the disdainful Laura. Daphne, the recalcitrant virgin forever
eluding the lover, is the ideal vehicle, not simply because she belongs to a mythical universe of timeless
images but because Petrarch makes her a figura, a prefiguration of Laura.” 88.
58
Sturm-Maddox continues her explanation, noting, “the breeze originates in the laurel (129) or moves
‘softly sighing’ through both the green laurel and her golden hair (246); the poet’s burning sighs that never
moved a leaf of the lovely branches’ (318) recall, in an allusion not visible on the surfact of the text, the
44

She is the nymph who becomes the tree. In this way she is “fixed” to the tree, caught by
what Petrarch proposes as the inevitably of her disappearance into the form of the laurel.
For Petrarch, Daphne has no narrative other than the metamorphosis.
Penned at the point of departure, Daphne becomes simply the elusive
female/laurel, not an Ovidian character who has an independent narrative with multiple
ambiguous significations. Petrarch does not present “Daphne then laurel”; instead he
celebrates the simultaneity of “Daphne and laurel.”
59
Fixing Daphne to the laurel
becomes the method of stabilizing her meaning even if Petrarch’s lover cannot prevent
her elusive flight. Thus, when Petrarch employs the figure of the laurel, he reiterates and
reinforces a rigid connection between Daphne (the elusive beloved) and the tree (the
glory of poetry) that her active fleeing in Ovid resists.
60
With his pen, Petrarch aims to
render Daphne into a form that is, at least temporarily, controlled. By employing
emblematic images that attempt to “freeze” Daphne at the moment of her escape,
Petrarch’s poems erase the ambiguity of Daphne’s transformation. They also ignore
Daphne’s own motivations for flight. The emblematic images of Daphne work to reduce
the infinite meanings of Daphne’s escape to a finite figure. In this way, Petrarch’s poetic
rendering of Daphne functions in a manner similar to the woodcut emblems of Daphne
and Apollo that were popular in early modern print culture. The Sudeley Apollo’s efforts
to “engrave” upon the tree enact the process of creating a woodcut at the same time that

sensual suggestiveness of the moment in which Ovid’s Apollo comes closest to Daphne, his breath
touching ‘the locks that lay scattered on her neck,’” Sara Sturm-Maddox, Petrarch’s Laurels
(Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 19.
59
ibid., 17.
60
See Chapter One for examination of how Daphne’s movement resists the simple equation between her
body and the static tree.
45

they recall Petrarch’s attempts to capture Daphne with a pen. The images in early
modern emblem books that feature the chase of Apollo and Daphne usually capture
Daphne at the moment of metamorphosis; she almost always appears as a monstrous
figure who is half-woman, half-tree.
61
Like Petrarch’s beloved, she is caught in the
moment of her disappearance. Many woodcuts depict her head and arms as branches
while her legs remain in their human form. One emblem whose image appears in two
separate collections printed by Barthelemy Aneau renders Daphne almost entirely
enclosed by the tree.
62
The space of her face is blank, erased by the process of the
metamorphosis but not yet covered by the bark of the tree. Her hair remains and it flows
behind the top of a tree-trunk torso as the biceps of her arms merge with the branches that
wave above her head where her hands used to be. In spite of the fact that many early
modern commentators describe the metamorphosis as immobilizing, the Daphne in the
Aneau woodcut appears in motion. Even though the bottom of her trunk/body is outlined
in rough marks that resemble the ragged edges of tree bark and her feet are
indecipherable where the trunk meets the ground, her front leg crosses over the back one.
Apollo, to the right of Daphne, has legs that are depicted in the action of running with
elongated strides; his left arm reaches out toward her but does not touch her body. The
sense of accelerated motion in the image is enhanced by the multiple circular lines that
represent Apollo’s cape being blown by the wind. It is as if the lines that frame the
image itself are the only means of slowing down the two figures. Within the image,

61
Many woodcuts from the fifteenth-century depict Daphne fleeing from Apollo. Mary Barnard publishes
two woodcut images from the Ovide Moralise and three from Christine de Pizan’s L’Epitre d’Othea.
62
See figure 1. Barthelemy Aneau, Picta Poesis, at “French Emblems at Glasgow,”
http://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk./french/facsimile.php?id=sm96_c8r
46

Daphne–almost completely transformed into the tree—continues to escape from Apollo,
even at the moment when the emblem immobilizes her in perpetuum.
Other representations of Daphne—one early miniature that accompanies the pages
of Christine de Pizan’s L’Epitre d’Othea (1450/60) and another from Rafael Regius’s
commentary on Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1518)—demonstrate the pervasiveness of the
phenomenon of capturing Daphne while she runs away from both Apollo and her
Figure 1: Aneau, Barthélemy: Picta poesis (1552)

transformation.
63
In the image from de Pizan’s fifteenth-century L’Epitre d’Othea,
Daphne retains her human form from the neck down and the outlines of her face remain

63
Malcomson and Suzuki note that “Christine’s clear popularity in late-fifteenth0century England, when
many translations of her works were printed and attributed to her, extended into the later Tudor courts
47

visible beneath the ink that represents the base of a large tree top that grows out of her
neck and shoulders. Her remaining human parts look as though they are walking away
from Apollo since her front leg crosses over the back. The woodcut that accompanies
Regius’s commentary similarly depicts Daphne as a woman from the neck down as she
runs top-heavy with the load of an immense tree above her head.
64
Her front foot also
crosses over its pair in the motion of escape, her humanness figured almost entirely by
her motion away from the pursuing Apollo. In almost all representations of Daphne, the
boughs of her treeified arms extend beyond the edges of the picture. Although they
depict Daphne escaping from Apollo, the woodcuts themselves trap her within their
rectangular frames. The images therefore succeed where Apollo fails. In fact, we might
even say that by catching Daphne in print, they flaunt the fact that they can keep her from
escaping from the page even though the god Apollo could not reach her before she
receded into the laurel.
The written phrases that accompany the images of the emblems also work to
freeze Daphne. The emblems’ mottos often reduce the story to a singular explanation
that is similar to the Sudeley Apollo’s aphorism, “that neither men nor gods can force
affection.” The Aneau woodcut with its amazing sense of captured motion appears on
the page entitled “Mulier umbra viri” (“The woman is the shadow of the man”) even
though the figure of Apollo is positioned to the right where he would be in Daphne’s
shadow according to the other shading in the woodcut. The additional phrase at the

thorugh teh existence of manuscripts in the royal libraries including the Livre de la cite des dames, and
through tapestries representing the Cite des dames in Elizabeth’s rooms. “Introduction,” in Debating
Gender in Early Modern England, 1500-1700 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
64
See Figure 2. From Raphael Regius (died 1520), Venice ca. 1513.
48

Figure 2: Raphael Regius, Metamorphoses

bottom of the woodcut explains, “Phoebum virgo fugit Daphne inviolata sequentem”
(“Daphne flees inviolate from Apollo who follows”). The phrase fails to correspond with
the fact that Daphne is almost entirely treeified in the image. The phrase thus aids Apollo
in capturing Daphne by reducing her elusiveness to a neat, explanatory aphorism. The
image, the heading, and the phrase limit the meaning of Daphne’s flight, but the gap
between the pictorial representations and the reductive interpretations assigned to them
also betrays an uncanny sense of the disjuncture.
When the Sudeley Daphne flees away from Apollo’s move to write on her body,
she thwarts the emblematic freezing of her flight as well as the use of her treeified body
as a prompt for the exploration of the male-centered struggle for poetic expression. As he
stands next to the tree, the words of Apollo’s sonnet ignore Daphne’s presence within the
49

tree for the first ten lines. For over half of the poem, Apollo boasts of the concord that
exists between his heart and his tongue. Like the god of poetry, he sings his own praises.
He declares his poetic superiority since “what [his] hart would speake, the tongue doeth
still discouer; / What tongue doth spake, is of the hart embraced,/ And both are one to
make a new found louer” (7-9). Yet, in spite of the amazing cooperation between his two
body parts, his words are unsuccessful since “chaste thoughts do mount, and she with
swiftest wings, / My loue with paine, my paine with losse rewarded” (11-12).
Addressing Daphne only indirectly with allusions to her “chaste thoughts” and the
“swiftest wings,” the poem is all but indifferent to her desires and her own bodily
subjectivity. In this Petrarchan mode, the sonnet uses the figure of the laurel merely as an
opportunity for the poet to exemplify the struggle for his own poetic achievement.
By ignoring the Petrarchan verses of her male pursuers, Daphne becomes her own
active subject. She never speaks to any of the male characters before she arrives at
Elizabeth; and when she does speak to Apollo, she accuses him of the crime of entering
her into the stifling tree. She ignores the actor playing Apollo who declares that he will
yield his claim on Daphne to the rude Shepherd whose story began the performance. He
runs after Daphne and yells out, “Shepherd possess thy loue, for me too cruell,/ posses
thy loue . . .” Yet, Daphne’s subsequent lines to Elizabeth fail to acknowledge Apollo’s
intent to pass her off to the Shepherd. Daphne’s first utterance, “I stay, for whether
should chastety fly for succour, but to the Queene of chastety” (13-4), works as a non
sequitor that accentuates her indifference to Apollo’s declaration that the Shepherd
50

should possess her.
65
The Sudeley Daphne seizes active control over her story with not
only the unexpectedness of her post-metamorphic speech but also her willful refusal to
listen to the male characters.
Daphne’s uncommon agency in her flight away from Apollo involves an active
refusal to listen. The glaring gap between the speeches of the male characters and
Daphne’s own speech exaggerates the significance of her willful inability to hear their
words and accept them into her consciousness. As Gina Bloom argues in Voices in
Motion, in the early modern period “communicative agency can inhere in the position of
listening, not just in speaking.”
66
The words that open the Sudeley performance
underscore the primacy of Daphne’s position as an active (non-)listener. After the
Sudeley Apollo chases Daphne, the Shepherd follows, uttering the Ovidian Apollo’s
lines, “nescis temeraria; nescis quem fugias; ideoque fugis” (you, frightened girl, do not
know; you do not know from whom you flee; and therefore you flee) (478). Employed in
the Metamorphoses’s tale of Pallas’s punishment of Arachne, the word “temeraria”
connotes obstinacy as much as a passive fear. With these words, the performance
accentuates Ovid’s own insistence that Daphne’s flight away from Apollo is a means of
obstructing the reception of his words. The problem for the Sudeley Apollo, as it is for
the Ovidian Apollo, is not that he is unable to speak effectively, but rather that Daphne
actively refuses to listen. It is in Daphne’s flight that the performance locates the main
thrust of her resistance; with the movement of her body, the Sudeley Daphne engages in a

65
Daphne’s indifference toward the pitiful Shepherd also counters Montrose’s arguments that the
performance privileges the pastoral in a purely encomiastic mode. The Shepherd may be pitiful and able to
petition Elizabeth, but ultimately, he disappears from the performance when Daphne emerges out of the
tree.
66
Bloom, 8.
51

powerful act of aural insubordination.
67
When the Sudeley Daphne issues out of the tree
that Apollo has attempted to engrave, she rejects both the Petrarchan attempt to “fix” her
body in words and the emblems’ efforts to trap her in a visual image. She insists on
performing her own active story.

Embodying a Shared Subjectivity

As the representative of “chastity” runs toward the “queen of chastity,” the
Sudeley Daphne re-centers her story around an exclusively female relationship. The
actress playing Daphne draws Elizabeth from the audience into the center of the
performance as well as into the category of chaste women. The practice of casting
Elizabeth as both audience and participant follows the standards of many Elizabethan
court pageants. The depiction of Elizabeth’s ability, in Philippa Berry’s words, “to
redeem a fallen world because of her self-sufficiency or chastity” is a pageant
commonplace.
68
What is particular to the Sudeley performance, however, is the female
sex of the courtier who praises Elizabeth and offers her the tables of poetry. The one who

67
This attention to Daphne’s “hearing” as a prime indicator of her agency is prompted by Gina Bloom’s
provocative analysis of how Shakespeare’s late plays dramatize an early modern conceputalization of the
importance of listening. In her analysis of Cymbeline and The Tempest, Gina Bloom writes that “as the
plays construct a climate of fear around female hearing, they represent female acoustic subjectivity as
emerging less from the conditions of aural subjugation than from the practice of aural insubordination,”
142.
68
Berry, 85. One example comes from the Queen’s Visit to Theobalds, May 1591 where a gardener tells of
the magical reappearance of a ring that he buried “never from the earth to be torn, /Till a virgin had reigned
thirty-three years,/ Which shall be but the fourth part of her years.” In The Complete Works of John Lyly
v.1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902), 416.
52

entreats Elizabeth is not the Petrarchan lover from many earlier court entertainments.
69

Instead, it is a female figure who obviously rejects the Petrarchan modes of courtship and
embodies a drastic revision to the traditional story of male ambitions. Daphne’s lines to
Elizabeth, made possible by Daphne’s embodied emergence out of the restrictive tree,
praise the queen without the overtones of heterosexual suits and shift the emphasis to the
shared physical experience of female chastity.
The performance’s focus on the physicality of the female body calls attention to
the physical qualities that the honored queen shares with her female subjects. What is
most memorable about the Sudeley performance is that it departs from Ovid’s story by
insisting on the self-sufficiency of the chastity of the physical female body. In contrast to
poems that insist that the tree is the most durable form of female chastity, the Sudeley
performance provides the opportunity for the audience to view the strength of chastity
displayed in Elizabeth’s physical interaction with another female body. Other progress
performances include female characters, such as nymphs or virgins, who honor Elizabeth
with songs, but the Sudeley performance adds to this tradition by giving the actress
playing Daphne lines that are spoken directly to the queen that resemble those of male
petitioners from earlier performances.
70
At Sudeley, Elizabeth’s physical presence

69
Earlier royal performances that feature Elizabeth as Diana often involve male supplicants who court the
queen with love poetry. At the moon-shaped pond in the Elvetham entertainments, all of the subjects who
praise Elizabeth are male. So is the herald who sings the ode“At the Early of Cumberland’s Shew on
Horseback” on May 1, 1600 which announces that Cynthia “is descended;/ With bright beames and
heauenly hew” in the form of Elizabeth’s earthly body, from Davison’s Poetical Rapsody, 1602 reprinted in
The Complete Works of John Lyly v.1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902), 414. A male poet also names
Elizabeth “sweet Cynthia” on the fourth day of the Elvetham entertainments. “The Speech of the Fairy
Queene to her Maiestie” at Elvetham is an exception in which a female character names Elizabeth “shinig
Phoebe, that in humaine shape/ Hidst heauens perfection.”
70
Peter Davidson and Jane Stevenson argue that the performance for Elizabeth as Bisham, which
immediately preceeded that at Sudeley, was “the first occasion on which English noblewomen took
53

provides the safety for the joint phenomena of a noblewoman speaking in a dramatic
performance and Daphne’s reverse metamorphosis into a speaking female body.
The phenomenological experience of Daphne bursting forth from the tree and
running toward Elizabeth elucidates a crucial feature present in Ovid’s story that is
omitted from most early modern retellings: Daphne’s active desire to be like Diana. As I
argue in Chapter One, Ovid’s text invites readers to consider the ways that Daphne’s
flight is motivated by desires that have nothing to do with Apollo. Even before Apollo
enters Daphne’s consciousness in Ovid, she expresses the ambition to live perpetually
without a spouse. She asks her father leave to remain unmarried and childless when she,
in Golding’s translation, “did fold about hir fathers necke with fauning armes and sed:
Deare father, graunt me while I live my maidenhead for to have, / As to Diana here tofore
hir father freely gave” (587-89). The reasoning behind Daphne’s wish to remain a maid
is not immediately represented as a fear of sexual contact. Instead, Daphne aims to
emulate Diana’s active and independent lifestyle since “in woods and forrests is hir joy,
the saveage beasts to chase” (573).
71
Daphne takes pleasure in the vigorous acts of
coursing through the forest as a huntress even before she flees through the same space
with Apollo at her heels. The performance at Sudeley remembers that Daphne runs as
much out of her ambition to follow the autonomous footsteps of the goddess of chastity
as out of her fear of Apollo’s attempted assault.

speaking roles in a quasi-dramatic performance,” in “Elizabeth I’s Reception at Bisham,” in The
Progresses, Pageants, & Entertainments of Queen Elizabeth I, eds. Jayne Elisabeth Archer, Elizabeth
Goldring, and Sarah Knight (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 207-226.
71
Many progress entertainments also focus on the love of hunting that Elizabeth shares Diana and Daphne,
including the performance at Cowdray where musicians sang a song while “her Maiestie shot at the deere,”
in Lyly, 423.
54

The Sudeley performance also interprets Daphne’s desire to be like Diana in Ovid
as a desire for a relationship with Diana. In Ovid’s tale, Daphne’s disregard for “Hymen,
or for love, and wedlocke” (579) betokens a homosocial interest as much as a disdain for
male companionship. Daphne does not wish simply for solitude. Instead, she exerts
herself with hunting, and “unwedded Phebe doth [she] haunt and follow as hir guide”
(575). By “haunting” Diana, Daphne acts like a pursuer who seeks female comradery as
vehemently as she rejects her male suitors. These homosocial resonances are recalled
when the Sudeley performance directs Daphne’s footsteps toward the Diana-like
Elizabeth. Daphne’s lines highlight a homosocial agenda by replacing the customary
heterosexual desires of virgins for husbands with Daphne’s ardent hopes for her queen’s
welfare. She asks that Elizabeth “vouchsafe a poore virgins wish, that often wish for
good husbands, mine only for the endlesse prosperity of my soueraigne” (23-25).
Daphne’s lines substitute the queen in the place of a husband in the same way that
Elizabeth’s speeches frequently name her kingdom as her spouse. Appealing to a female
bond with Elizabeth, Daphne’s wishes for the well-being of the queen mirrors Elizabeth’s
declaration of her love for her subjects. Both shun marriage in their devotions to the
welfare of the realm.
Casting Elizabeth as the goddess Diana reinforces these homosocial resonances
since Diana is most often accompanied by her protective community of women in early
modern literature. The stories of Diana repeated most often in sixteenth-century English
poetry frequently address the features of Diana’s all-female community of nymphs who
aggressively guard against male threats to female chastity. In the story of how Diana
55

punished Actaeon for invading the all-female space of her bathing pool, the exclusively
female community plays a central role as the narration lingers on the details of the troupe
of nymphs washing Diana’s body and on their role in defending her from Actaeon’s
gaze.
72
Golding’s translation invites the gaze of the audience upon the named nymphs.
Niphe nete and cleene
With Hiale glistring liek the greass in beautie fresh and sheene,
And Rhanis cleare of hir skin than are the rainie drops,
And little bibling Phyale, and Pseke that pretie Mops
Powrde water into vessels large to washe their Ladie with. (200-4)

The voyeuristic gaze of Golding’s reader lands on Diana’s body through the poem’s
erotic descriptions of the nymphs touching Diana.
73
Philippa Berry suggests that the
homoeroticism of poetry in praise of Elizabeth is evident in the fact that “at the heart of
this cult [of Elizabeth] were numerous depictions of a woman with other women.”
74
By
invoking the story of Diana with her nymphs in naming Elizabeth as “the queen of
chastity,” the Sudeley performance puts forward an image of the exceptional bonds that
Elizabeth shares with her female subjects. Like the stories of Diana’s forceful protection
of her vulnerable body, the Sudeley revision of Apollo and Daphne prioritizes an all-
female community that works together in active defense of and authority over female
chastity. It also petitions Elizabeth to recognize her role in protecting her vulnerable
female subjects.

72
See Spenser’s incorporation of the story of Diana and Actaeon in both Book III and the Cantos of
Mutability in The Faerie Queene.
73
Ovids plays with an explicitly homosexual narrative in the story of Callisto when Jove disguises himself
as Diana and then proceeds to kiss her fervently before he reveals himself as a male god. After Ovid’s
narrator stresses that Callisto tried to fight off Jove’s embrace, Diana’s expulsion of Callisto from her
troupe prompts Ovid’s readers to re-consider the terms of membership in Diana’s chaste train.
74
Berry, 65.
56

Elizabeth’s physical protection enables Daphne to settle the debates over the
poetic meaning of her own metamorphosis from a uniquely female perspective. When
the Sudeley Daphne arrives at Elizabeth, she is able to turn to Apollo and say, “by thee
was I enterred in a tree, that by crafte, way might be made to lust” (14-15). Daphne’s
lines accuse Apollo of causing her metamorphosis so that he could have access to her
body to fulfill his lust. From Daphne’s perspective, the metamorphosis becomes a sign of
Apollo’s depravity; for her, the tree is not another form of her identity, instead it is a
mechanism that stalled her body for Apollo’s lewd access. Daphne’s simple accusation
severs her relationship with the tree and marks the tree as a consequence of Apollo’s vice
rather than a symbol of her virtuous or condemnable virginity. In other words, Daphne’s
revision does more than accuse Apollo; it demands that the critical scrutiny of female
sexuality be redirected toward examinations of the lustful assaults of aggressive male
characters.
By dramatizing a relationship between Elizabeth and Daphne, the Sudeley
performance grants Daphne an embodied subjectivity that opens the way for her to take a
definitive and poetic position against the uses of her story for patriarchal purposes. When
she turns to accuse Apollo, her lines echo Ovid’s accusation of the gods in his invocation
to the Metamorphoses. Ovid’s invocation suggests that the gods are guilty of the
transformations depicted in his seamless poem when he demands, “gods (since you were
the ones who made these changes and others) breath life into my attempt” (di coeptis nam
vos mutastis et illas adspirate meis 1.2-3) . Voicing an accusation against Apollo that
imitates Ovid’s accusation against the gods, Daphne showcases the prerogative of the
57

female subject to offer the authoritative interpretation of the meaning of her own
transformation; the power to resolve the debates about Daphne’s transformation into the
tree lies in the sufficient female body in the Sudeley performance.
The Sudeley performance reshapes the debate about female chastity in the story of
Apollo and Daphne so that it focuses on the embodied female presence instead of her
absence within the tree. The performance thereby realizes what Philippa Berry describes
in other contexts as the early modern “anxiety that the [female] beloved’s passive power
might suddenly seek active expression, in an assertion of her own feelings and desires
which threatened to escape the rhetorical or imaginative control of the male lover.”
75
The
revision that takes Daphne out of the tree and frees her into her human shape celebrates
the autonomous and unconstrained female body that is shared by the subject Daphne and
her authoritative queen.

75
Berry, 4.
58

Chapter Three
Outpacing Daphne: Running without Metamorphosis in The Faerie Queene

Spenser’s obsessive attention to the details of Daphne and Florimell’s fleeing
bodies reveal that his interest in the elusive female challenges even Petrarch’s. By
running his fleeing female in the footsteps of Ovid’s nymph, Spenser incorporates the
complicated history of Daphne’s chastity into the Faerie Queene. With his acute
mimicry of the fleeing woman from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Spenser primes Spenser’s
readers to expect Florimell, who flees even faster and farther than Daphne, to experience
a transformation that rivals the stunning metamorphosis of Daphne into the laurel tree,
the emblem of poetic achievement. The moment of Daphne’s metamorphosis frequently
dominates early modern English responses to Ovid’s story, and, for many early modern
English poets, Daphne’s flight has significance only insofar as it precedes her
transformation into Apollo’s tree.
76
Her story functions merely as an aetion for audiences
concerned primarily with the explanation of the origins of the connection between poetic
victory and the laurel tree. From this perspective, the significance of Daphne’s flight
depends upon her subsequent transformation into the laurel tree. Yet, for Florimell,
Spenser’s chaste female, there is no metamorphic intervention, and Spenser shuns the
long-standing association between the elusive female and the laurels of poetry. In fact
Book III of The Faerie Queene makes no mention of the words laurels or bays in

76
See Chapter Two for a summary of the multiple early modern poetic renditions of Daphne as the tree.
59

conjunction with comments on poetry or in meta-poetic episodes.
77
By omitting any
direct reference to the laurels of poetry, Spenser denies the story of Daphne’s
transformation as the sign of his poetic triumph and refashions the significance of the
fleeing female body in poetry.
That Spenser ignores the laurels almost completely in his allegorical
representation of the chaste fleeing female in The Faerie Queene marks a significant
deviation from his other poetic tendencies. Throughout his romance epic, Spenser
invokes the Ovidian figure of Daphne and he frequently engages multiple Ovidian and
Petrarchan conceits. In addition, he grapples with the relationship between the elusive
beloved and the laurels of poetry in multiple sonnets in his Amoretti.
78
Spenser’s refusal
of the association between poetic laurels and the transformation of the fleeing female also
contradicts Marvell’s seventeenth-century announcement that poets of the past “chased”
Daphne only to achieve the bays of poetry. Spenser’s omission, therefore, courts the
question: what about the poetic project of representing chastity in late sixteenth century
England prevents him from immortalizing his fleeing female and his poetry with
references to the triumphant bays? In other words: what are the benefits of freeing
Florimell to run without metamorphosis, beyond the reach of fictional pursuers and
triumphant poets?
This chapter examines this question through two critical lenses. First, it considers

77
Spenser descirbes the laurel tree as “meed of mightie Conquerors/ And Poets sage” in his list of trees in
the forest where Una and her Dwarf wander in Book I, but he omits any direct equation between poetry and
the bays in Book III where the laurels appear as part of the landscape where Timias lies wounded in v.40.
78
The Speaker of “Sonnet XXVIII” announces that the laurel leaf is “the badg which I doe beare” before
begging, “fly no more fayre loue from Phebus chace,/ but in your brest his leafe and loue embrace” (ln 3,
14).
60

how the Protestant revolution in chastity alters the tradition of representing female virtue
in poetry. By presenting a fleeing female who is never stalled by a physical
metamorphosis, Spenser denies the stasis of virginity and rewrites female chastity as a
virtue that requires positive action. Spenser accordingly pushes Florimell to outpace
Daphne with her speed and superior virtue.
79
Second, this chapter considers how
Spenser’s vision of the poet’s relationship to the female body differs from Ovid and
Petrarch’s. At the same time that Spenser relies on the poetic authority of his
predecessors, he distances his poetic triumph from violence to the female body. As
Florimell flees again and again beyond the edges of the pages of Spenser’s text without
the protection (or threat) of a metamorphosis, Spenser rewrites both the value of chastity
and its poetic representation.

Faster than Virgin Virtue and Vice

Spenser’s Faerie Queene names Daphne primarily so that Florimell can run past
her. In other words, Ovid’s nymph functions in Spenser’s poem as a marker of the
outmoded value of perpetual virginity. Flying so fast that she seems to outrun the powers
that might slow her down with a metamorphosis, Florimell accentuates Spenser’s
promotion of the virtue of chaste affection over stale virginity. By running faster than

79
For a history of medieval and early modern readers engaging with Ovid’s representations of virtue, see
Mark Amsler’s “Rape and Silence: Ovid’s Mythography and Medieval Readers,” in Representing Rape in
Medieval and Early Modern Literature, eds. Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M. Rose, (New York:
Palgrave, 2001), 61-96. Amsler writes that “Ovid’s stories of rape, attempted rape, and kidnapping were
read and interpreted not only as adventurous, fantastic narratives but just as often as exempla, coded texts
requiring contextualizing interpretation, especially learned exegesis, to make clear the stories’ moral
messages for Christian readers,” 63.
61

Daphne, Florimell looks like Daphne, but she escapes the metamorphosis that stalls
Daphne and locks her into virgin stasis. Florimell’s narrative thereby works to prove that
female chastity requires active engagement by the female body since her devotion to
chastity generates an ability to fly so fast that she cannot be stalled even by
metamorphosis.
Florimell’s relationship to Daphne positions her precariously in between the
virtues of virginity and married chastity. The ambivalence of her position works well for
Spenser since he writes from a Protestant perspective that lauds chaste marriage for the
purposes of procreation and for a virgin queen. Even though Spenser does not list her as
one of the manifestations of Elizabeth I in his “Letter to Ralegh,” Florimell’s relationship
to exemplary virginity clearly renders her a figure for negotiating The Faerie Queene’s
engagement with Elizabeth’s sexuality. Philippa Berry notes that Elizabeth’s “unmarried
state was in conflict with Protestant ideology, which had removed the option of a celibate
monastic life from both men and women, and which had commenced a propaganda
campaign on the importance of marriage several years before Elizabeth’s accession.”
80

Spenser’s departure from Golding’s praise for the metamorphosis of the fleeing
female stands out in contrast against his acute attention to Golding’s description of
Daphne’s flight. By prioritizing the flight and not the transformation, Spenser dismisses
the virtue of the unyielding tree. According to Syrithe Pugh, “the Chastity which the
book celebrates is not the chastity enshrined in Elizabeth, not virginity but faithful

80
Berry includes the lines from The Book of Common Prayer that endorsed marriage as “an honourable
estate, instituted of God in paradise at the time of man’s innocency, signifying unto us the mystical union
that is betwixt Christ and his church,” 66.
62

procreative love.”
81
His poem therefore endorses early modern commentators and poets
who view Daphne’s transformation into the tree as a sign of her excessive pride and
foolish devotion to sterile virginity. Even Sonnet XXVIII of Spenser’s Amoretti
identifies Daphne’s transformation into the tree as the consequence of the gods’ anger at
proud Daphne for fleeing. The fleeing female, who conveys herself away to avoid sexual
violation distinguishes Spenser’s visions of chastity as significantly different from and
more active than Ovid’s virgin tree.
Spenser clearly belittles metamorphoses that result in stasis throughout his poem.
In fact, no major characters experience bodily transformations in spite of the abundance
of Ovidian allusions. Readers learn about metamorphoses only through second-hand
stories. One such story explains the magic properties of the stream that causes
Redcrosse’s “manly forces . . . to faile.” Diana, goddess of chastity, changed a nymph
into the fountain after the nymph slowed down during a hunt. The narrator explains that
This Nymph, quite tyr’d with heat of scorching ayre
Sat downe to rest in middest of the race:
The goddesse wroth gan fowly her disgrace,
And bad the waters, which from her did flow,
Be sure as she her selfe was then in place.
Thenceforth her waters waxed dull and slow,
And all that drunke thereof, did faint and feeble grow. (I.vii.5.3-9)

Here, the story of metamorphosis is specifically associated with the slowness of the
nymph’s body and her refusal to continue the chase. The nymph’s stopping in the midst
of the race stands in opposition to Florimell’s amazing endurance that never results in a

81
Pugh, 121.
63

Daphne-like metamorphosis.
82
By punishing the nymph with metamorphosis for slowing
down, Diana—the goddess of chastity—distances chastity from sluggishness and marks
metamorphosis as a sign of depravity rather than virtue. She thereby upholds swiftness
and endurance as the markers of the virtue of chastity.
The poem’s allusion to the swift figure of Daphne is complicated by the poem’s
coupling of her name with Myrrha’s. In canto vii of Book III, Florimell leaps down from
her exhausted horse to flee from the hyena with her own feet, and Spenser describes her
amazing speed via a comparison to Daphne only after he first compares her to the
incestuous Myrrha. He writes,
Not halfe so fast the wicked Myrrha fled
From dread of her reuenginig fathers hond
Nor halfe so fast to saue her maidenhed
Fled fearefull Daphne on th’ Aegean strond,
As Florimell fled from that Monster yond.

In the allusion, Florimell appears not like Myrrha and similar to Daphne. Myrrha clearly
runs away on account of guilt and culpability. Readers most likely understand that
Florimell runs faster than “wicked Myrrha” on account of her contrasting purity since her
Dwarf claims earlier that there “liues none this day, that may with her [Florimell]
compare/ In stedfast chastitie and vertue rare” (III.v.8). As Syrithe Pugh reminds us,
Myrrha is the “epitome of all that is antithetical to chastity (Latin incestus=’unchaste’).”
Therefore, Myrrha functions as the antithesis to Florimell. We assume that Florimell is

82
According to Syrithe Pugh: “The story of the nymph’s transformation has been described as ‘a blend of
the Daphne and Arethusa tales’ from Ovid’s Metamorphoses . . . the tales of Arethusa and Daphne form
part of a family of myths in the Metamorphoses concerning nymphs and women who either, like the nymph
here, escape rape by metamorphosis, or are metamorphosed after their rape . . . Spenser’s tale [of Diana’s
nymph] is intended to recall the type rather then [sic] the individual instance, evoking the ethical landscape
of the Metamorphoses, that is, the actions and attitudes typical of gods and humans in Ovid’s myths, and
Ovid’s symbolically and magically charged settings which variously reflect, aid, or stand as mythological
symbols for human impulses such as violence or chastity,” 84.
64

more similar to Daphne since she also runs “to saue her maidenhead.” Florimell must run
twice as fast because her distress is greater as she runs away from multiple pursuers.
But the announcement that Florimell surpasses both Myrrha and Daphne solicits
comparisons between Myrrha’s lust and Daphne’s virginity. It invites readers to consider
how Daphne’s (and potentially Florimell’s) devotion to virginity might be as flawed as
Myrrha’s wicked lust for her father. The parallel syntax of the phrases “Not halfe so
fast” and “Nor halfe so fast” place Myrrha and Daphne at the same speed. In other
words, the process of distancing Florimell from both Daphne and Myrrha works to equate
the excessive desires of stale virginity and wanton incest. In fact, by underscoring how
Florimell runs faster than both Daphne and Myrrha, Spenser can assert the differences
between the characters only by asking readers to imagine the similarities of all three
fleeing women.
The insistence that Florimell runs faster than both “fearefull Daphne” and
“wicked Myrrha” ultimately suggests a wariness about how the flight of the fleeing virgin
might be interpreted as passions that are beyond the limits of social acceptance.
Advocating chaste affection involves the risk of freeing female desires, and Spenser’s
coupling of Daphne with Myrrha exposes anxiety about unlimited and autonomous
female flight. Spenser’s narrative breaks off into the two allusions to Ovid’s fleeing
women at the very moment when Florimell’s flight is most independent. As explained
above, Florimell has fled the hag’s hut and is almost overtaken by the hag’s hyena, but
she is defined so absolutely by her perpetual motion that she then continues to run on foot
when her exhausted “dull horse” (III.vii.25.8) ceases to run. Her determination to take to
65

her own feet emphasizes the self-generating nature of her movement and also her
willingness and ability to act autonomously. While her flight seems like a clear
indication of refusal—Daphne runs to refuse Apollo just as Florimell runs to escape her
pursuers—it is also an indication of active female desire, like Myrrha’s, that has the
potential to run beyond the bounds of social control. The fleeing woman who runs away
from male lust can invoke the story of Daphne’s unblemished virginity,
83
and it also
betokens the excessive sexual appetite that results in Myrrha’s transgressive intercourse
with her father. Florimell therefore has a precarious relationship to the extremes of both
perpetual virginity and debauched wantonness. By comparing Florimell with not only
Daphne but also Myrrha, Spenser identifies the ease with which his allegory of chastity-
in-flight might be misconstrued as a representation of illicit desires. Florimell, therefore,
must outpace not only the hyena and other characters who chase her but also the
associations of deviant female sexuality that precede her.
84

Separated by Flight: The Two Florimells

Florimell’s ability to run faster than her literary predecessor denotes the
superiority of her chastity as well as the key to her opposition to the False Florimell.
Spenser poses an obvious task for readers to distinguish between true and false virtue

83
In medieval commentaries of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Daphne frequently stands in as a figure for the
Virgin Mary.
84
On an allegorical level, Florimell overcomes the potential errors of female desire on account of her
superior devotion to chastity over virginity or lust. On a literal level, she surpasses Myrrha and Daphne on
account of the speed of her flight. It is in the intersection of the allegorical and the literal where Spenser
locates the qualities of chaste affection.
66

with his creation of the two Florimells. Thomas Roche suggests that they pose the
problem that the knights and readers have in identifying true, spiritual beauty. For him,
Florimell is "Spenser's figure of the spiritual beauty of the soul manifested through
physical beauty" while the False Florimell's "beauty is only physical and has the power to
inspire only lust.”
85
Yet, as Patrick Cheney argues, the particulars of the text do not
support the reduction of the differences between the two Florimells to the binary
distinction between true and false beauty. The beauty of Florimell sometimes appears
just as superficial as that of the False Florimell, especially when the “the poet emphasizes
the evocative power of her physiognomy, not of her inward spirit.”
86
In addition, the
False Florimell appears to inspire more than lust in the many knights who take her for the
true Florimell. She may appear to readers as a monster who is assembled out of the
pieces of Petrarchan blazons—snow, virgin wax, burning lamps, golden wire—but the
False Florimell surprisingly dupes both virtuous and non-virtuous knights.
87
The Chorle,
Braggadachio, Satyrane, Ferraugh, and other knights all mistake her for the true
Florimell. Cheney therefore prompts more complex interpretations of the two Florimells
since “the False Florimell is consistently being perceived as the real Florimell by knights
with generally virtuous souls (like Sir Satyrane); hence we cannot claim that she appeals
only to base minds.”
88

85
The Kindly Flame: A Study of the Third and Fourth Books of Spenser's "Faerie Queene" (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1964), 161-62
86
, Patrick Cheney, "‘And Doubted Her to Deeme an Earthly Wight’: Male Neoplatonic "Magic and the
Problem of Female Identity in Spenser's Allegory of the Two Florimells,” Studies in Philology, Vol. 86,
No. 3 (Summer, 1989): 310-340.
87
Mary Barnard points out that in Petrarch’s sonnet 198, “Amor ‘spins and weaves’ the gold to fashion
Laura’s blond hair . . . ; in astonished wonder the poet asks where Amor has gathererd the gold for the
blond tresses,” 88.
88
Cheney, 312.
67

Rebecca Yearling also suggests that the False Florimell is actually quite similar to
the lively original since she remains chaste during the narrative and demonstrates a basic
sense of fidelity by choosing Braggadachio at Satyrane’s tournament. Yearling argues
that the False Florimell possesses a form of chastity even though it is inferior to
Florimell’s. Thus, the two Florimells differ merely in terms of the degrees of their
chastity. Yearling proves that “there is, the poem implies, little real difference between
true and false virtue when neither has been tested . . . virtue cannot exist passively, but
must be proven in opposition.”
89
Yearling proposes that what separates the two
Florimells is that Florimell withstands tests to her chastity that render her virtue more
true. Florimell’s tests, however, fall short of the intensity of those endured by other
female characters, such as Amoret and Britomart, who suffer physical wounds of violent
penetration. Therefore, I disagree with Yearling’s assertion that the crucial distinction
between the two Florimells lies primarily in the true Florimell’s experience of arduous
trials. I do, nonetheless, follow her lead in considering Spenser’s idea of chastity as a
virtue that requires action; but I argue that Spenser’s allegorical representation of the true
Florimell’s superior virtue depends more crucially upon the difference between
Florimell’s flight and False Florimell’s passivity.
The False Florimell’s attempts to seem like her namesake betray her artificiality
to Spenser’s readers since they involve posturing in place of the actions. When the hag
first offers her to the churl, False Florimell, “the more to seeme such as she hight,/ Coyly
rebutted his [the Churle’s] embracement light” (III.viii.10). The resistance of her false

89
Rebecca Yearling, “Florimell’s Girdle: Reconfiguring Chastity in The Faerie Queene,” Spenser Studies:
A Renaissance Poetry Annual, Vol XX (2005): 139.
68

chastity consists of coy indifference and she lacks the active means of Florimell’s bodily
escape. While Florimell compels herself to run on two different occasions when her
horse is too exhausted to carry her, the False Florimell never takes to her own feet.
Passed from knight to knight to knight, False Florimell differs from the true Florimell on
account of her accentuated passivity. The knights scoop up False Florimell onto their
horses in the same comical way that the Giantesse scoops up her victims under her arms.
While the true Florimell rides alone on her palfrey, the False Florimell always rides as a
second passenger on the horse of the knight who has claimed her. When Braggadachio
first sees the False Florimell—whom he takes as the true—he announces boldly to the
Chorle: “I will away her beare” (III.viii.12). His thoughts about claiming her contrast
sharply with those of other knights who come upon the true Florimell and barely have the
time or opportunity even to think about chasing her. The narrative description of how the
Chorle then “yielded [Braggadachio] the pray” (III.viii.13) employs the language of
trafficking in women.
90
Unlike the true Florimell whose active chastity coincides with
her ability to take to her own feet and move herself, the False Florimell fails to take
action and becomes a mere object of exchange.
In her powers of flight, the true Florimell resembles Ariosto’s chaste Angelica at
the same time that she outpaces Daphne’s footsteps. By contrast, the False Florimell falls
conspicuously short of behaving like either the flying Daphne or Angelica. After the
Chorle yields False Florimell to Braggadachio, the knight Ferraugh attempts to seize her
almost immediately in a scene that reveals Spenser’s acute attention to the details

90
See Galye Rubin. “The Traffic in Women: Notes for a Radical Theory of teh Politics of Sexuality,”
Vance (1984): 267-319.
69

surrounding the story of the fleeing woman in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. Preparing to
fight Braggadachio for the dame they both mistake for Spenser’s Florimell, Ferraugh
imitates Ariosto’s Ferraw, who challenges Renaldo to a fight to win Angelica as a prize.
In Ariosto’s romance, Angelica—the chaste woman who flies like Daphne and who
serves as a model for the true Florimell—displays her wit and independence by fleeing at
the very moment that Ferraw and Renaldo engage in combat. Sir John Harrington’s 1591
English translation of the Orlando Furioso reads,
While they thus fight on foot and man to man,
And give and take so hard and heavy knocks,
Away the damsel posteth all she can;
Their pain and travail she requites with mocks.”
91

Angelica’s personal agenda and disregard for her pursuers results in her autonomous,
mocking departure at the very moment when the knights attempt to turn her into a trophy.
But, unlike Ariosto’s Ferraw and Renaldo who engage in a fierce combat that gives
Angelica the opportunity to run, Ferraugh and Braggadachio fail to clash in arms.
Instead, Spenser twists the story he imitates; Braggadachio flees while the False Florimell
stays. Instead of flying like the chased/chaste Angelica, the False Florimell waits until
she is set by Ferraugh upon his horse. While the fleeing women take positive action to
ensure their chastity, the False Florimell lacks the active virtue necessary for “taking her
own way.” Spenser’s deviation from the originary tale in Ariosto thereby accentuates the
problem of the False Florimell’s passivity.

91
Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, trans. Sir John Harrington, ed. Rudolf Gottfried (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1971), 29.
70

Always the Same

The true Florimell becomes even more distinct from both the static laurel tree and
the passive False Florimell when Spenser reverses her narrative in canto five. Spenser
underscores his larger project of rewriting of chastity as an active virtue by introducing a
remarkable inconsistency in his representation of Florimell’s flight.
92
In a narrative
transformation that rivals Daphne’s bodily metamorphosis from a nymph into the laurel
tree, Spenser transforms Florimell from the chaste, fleeing female into the chaser of the
chaste, wounded male. After four cantos of presenting Florimell fleeing from Arthur,
Guyon, Satyrane, the churl, the hyena,
93
Spenser undercuts his own story of her flight by
having her Dwarf explain to Arthur that Florimell’s past four days of endless running
have been directed toward finding the wounded Marinell, the one knight whom she loves
but who has no interest in her. The Dwarf says that
five dayes there be, since he [Marinell] (they say) was slaine,
And foure, since Florimell the Court for-went,
And vowed neuer to returned again,
Till him aliue or dead she did inuent. (III.v.10.1-4)

92
If, as Susan Frye writes, “chastity resides in female inaction and; rape in male action,” then Florimell’s
active body rewrites these assumptions. Susan Frye, “Of Chastity and Rape: Edmund Spenser Confronts
Elizabeth I in The Faerie Queene.” Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature. eds.
Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M. Rose (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 354.
93
Ariosto sets the precedent for multiplying the number of men pursuing the fleeing woman as Ruggiero,
Satyrane, Orlando, etc. form an ever-increasing line of men chasing Angelica. But the prevalence of the
fleeing woman who mimics Daphne having multiple suitors is evidenced by the shepherd in the
performance for Elizabeth at Sudeley who explains how he chased after Daphne and then discovered that
Apollo chased after her too. The multiplication of the suitors is also evidence of Spenser’s sense of the
burden of the fleeing woman’s literary history. He establishes the falseness of the competition of chasing
the chaste virgin by parodying the multiplication of suitors—mocking the fact that poet after poet seems
obsessed with her.
71

In this single sentence, Spenser seems to undermine all of his earlier representations of
Florimell and the nature of her connections to the virgin Daphne; he changes four days of
fleeing away from threatening pursuers into the purposeful search for an elusive
beloved.
94

With this drastic change to the narrative, Spenser insists on the active pursuit of
chaste affection at the expense of his own consistency.

With this reversal, Spenser wrests
Florimell’s story away from its associations with Daphne: unlike Daphne, who runs to
preserve her own virginity, Florimell becomes the female figure who is more like
Britomart, running through the forest in a chaste search for a beloved.
95
The narrative
transformation of Florimell’s running away from her pursuers into a search for her
chosen beloved points quite obviously to Spenser’s endorsement of the Protestant value
of married chastity over the virtue of perpetual virginity. Within the context of Daphne’s
story, the direction of Florimell’s fleeing toward Marinell makes her succumb to
Daphne’s father’s demands that she marry and abjure the virgin customs of Diana. As
Philippa Berry summarizes, “especially significant for Elizabeth’s cult of chastity was the
increasing ideological emphasis upon marriage.”
96

The observation that Florimell’s narrative inconsistencies correspond with
Spenser’s continual refashioning of his own representation of chastity is hardly new.

94
In his 1965 article on the connection between Florimell and Marinell in the Faerie Queene, William
Blissett keenly observes: “at the cost of discrepancy in the narrative, Spenser has linked Florimell’s flight
and Marinell’s wound.” William Blissett, “Florimell and Marinell,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-
1900 5.1 (1965): 95.
95
Linda Gregerson points out that Spenser always writes that Britomart acts according to her “chaste
affection” instead of her “chastity” in order to emphasize that her chastity involves desire for heterosexual
intimacy. In The Reformaion of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic. (Cambridge:
University of Cambridge, 1995).
96
Berry, 136.
72

Cheney argues that the link between Florimell’s flight away from pursuers and her search
for Marinell “hints at the causal relation between Neoplatonic love and Ovidian lust” that
Spenser negotiates in his heroic code of chastity.
97
He also identifies the problems with
the Neoplatonic reading of her flight; the misunderstanding of chastity “relegat[es] the
virtue to simple virginity, instead of enlarging it to include married love: for the
Neoplatonic mind, Chastity is a divine ideal reserved for a ‘Goddesse’ to be ‘adored,’ not
a real woman to be loved.”
98
Yearling notes that over the course of Florimell’s story
chastity moves from the “simple state of fidelity and virginity (essentially the refusal of
illegitimate sex) . . . to the complex, inclusive, and socially weighted virtue.”
99
Elizabeth
Bellamy argues that the early modern move toward embracing companionate marriage
that is figured in Milton’s Comus can be traced to the developing representations of
chastity in Spenser’s romance.
100
Yet, few scholars address how Spenser’s framing of
the active quality of Protestant chastity directly involves the fleeing female body. In
order to stress a change in the definition of female virtue, Spenser perpetuates the
narrative of sustained flight that ends only in a marriage that is sought by the chaste
female.
The reversal of Florimell’s narrative has the effect of a surprise revision to Ovid’s
story. In place of a spectacular metamorphosis of a fleeing woman into a static tree,
Spenser offers the startling transformation of the narrative surrounding the fleeing

97
Cheney 329.
98
Cheney, 321.
99
Yearling argues that the inconsistent narratives that describe the power of Florimell’s girdle actually
point to a change in Spenser’s representation of chastity. She argues that when the girdle falls from the
waist of the False Florimell in Book V it marks the pivotal moment when chastity becomes more than “a
simple state of fidelity and virginity.”
100
Elizabeth J. Bellamy, “Waiting for Hymen: Literary History as ‘Symptom’ in Spenser and Milton,”
English Literary Studies 64.2 (1997): 391-414.
73

woman while her body continues to fly in the same direction at the exact same pace of
elusive speed. Rather than a metamorphosis that enforces the inviolability of the virtuous
female body, Spenser underlines the constancy of her active movement. The particulars
of Florimell’s flying body do not change even after the dwarf announces that she is
actually not fleeing but rather searching. Before the reversal to her narrative, Florimell
flees “as light-foot hare from vew/ Of hunger swift, and sent of houndes trew” (III.iv.46).
After the narrative changes so that the reader knows that she is running to find Marinell
instead of merely running away from her pursuers, Florimell is still described as running
from a hungry animal, as “an Hynd forth singled from the heard,/ That hath escaped from
a rauenous beast” (III.vii.1). The image of Florimell running away from her pursuers
and the image of her running toward Marinell look exactly alike;
101
in both instances she
is described, first by Arthur and then by the narrator, as “carried away with wings of
speedy feare” (III.v.6) and so fast because “feare gaue her wings” (III.vii.26).
Regardless of whether she is the chased and the chaser, Florimell is carried by wings of
fear. Spenser, of course, stresses that the knights who follow her disregard her own
interior motivations in their chase after her, but he also stresses that flying toward chaste
affection looks almost exactly like flying toward perpetual virginity. In Florimell’s case,
both are driven by extreme experiences of fear. Even if the narrative insists that she has
become the chaser, she still looks like the chased. In other words, the endurance of her
chaste, fearful body is not diminished by the difference in her motivation.

101
Florimell also looks similar to Myrrha when she becomes the active pursuer; another indication that
Spenser’s promotion of the active qualities of chasitty is overshadowed by anxiety over female movement.
74

The constancy of Florimell’s flight coincides with the constancy of her active
chastity. When Spenser introduces Florimell at the beginning of canto vii, the
continuation of her flight is his foremost priority. Spenser defines her according to her
flight since
All that same euening she in flying spent,
And all that night her course continewed:
Ne did she let dull sleepe once to relent,
Nor wearinesse to slacke her hast, but fled
Euer alike, as if her former dred
Were hard behind, her readie to arrest. (III.vii.2)

The above passage points to the difficulty, especially in readings of Florimell, of
discerning the difference between chaste flight and chaste pursuit. The lines present her
constant movement and endurance as positive qualities that literally separate her from the
other characters in the text.
Spenser equates the positive action of the fleeing virgin with married chastity by
representing them both within a single, moving, female body.
102
Spenser transforms
only Florimell’s narrative; her fleeing body remains constantly engaged in the active
pursuit of virtue. The story around her changes, but the body of the virgin/chaste woman
remains unchanged. Florimell’s flight anticipates the complex, almost paradoxical, ideas
presented by Nature at the end of the Cantos of Mutabilitie. Nature finds that
all things stedfastnes doe hate
And changed be: yet being rightly wayd
They are not changed from their first estate;
But by their change their being doe dilate:
And turning to themselues at length againe,
Doe worke their owne perfection so by fate:
Then ouer them Change doth not rule and raigne;

102
Philippa Berry notes the difficulty of representing active female sexuality in a postiive manner on
account of the absence of precedents for early modern English writesr in Of Chastity and Power.
75

But they raigne ouer change, and doe their states maintaine. (vii.58)

This judgement from Nature corresponds with the way that Spenser changes the story of
Florimell’s flight without changing her body, the direction of her flight, or the nature of
her chastity. Spenser intensifies the constancy of female chastity in Protestant marriage
even though he seems to be relaxing the standard of chastity associated with rigid,
inviolable virginity.
When Florimell’s list of suitors expands beyond knights and peasants to include
the god Proteus, Spenser once again imitates Ovid’s story of Daphne, priming readers to
expect the long-deferred metamorphosis that might rescue or punish Florimell. But in
place of a metamorphosis of Florimell’s fleeing body, the reader witnesses the multiple
metamorphoses of Florimell’s male pursuer. The multiple changes of Proteus’s pursuing
body further highlight Florimell’s own lack of a metamorphosis. The absence of a
metamorphosis for Florimell renders the narrative moment when she finally stops fleeing
anti-climatic. The capture of Florimell pales in comparison to the reversal in the
narrative that defines her as an active female pursuing her own desires.
Spenser mocks the divine forces that transform Daphne into a tree by having the
lustful Proteus enter as the answer from the gods to Florimell’s pleas. After Florimell
takes her flight to the sea, she hijacks a boat from the sleeping mariner who eventually
wakes up and attempts to assault her.
103
At the point when the old mariner moves to
thrust his hand “where ill became him,” Florimell thwarts his contact and then “cride to
heauen,” echoing Daphne who “cried out, ‘Help me Father!’” ('fer, pater,' inquit 'opem!

103
The fact that the first male character who is able to put his hands on her is the old mariner who finds her
in the passive position of being carried by his boat strengthens the notion that Florimell’s self-propelled
flight is the strongest mechanism of defense against those who threaten her chastity.
76

Metamorphoses I.545). Spenser’s narrator first offers the pretense of help to Florimell on
account of her superior virtue:
But sith that none of all her knights is nye,
See how the heauens of voluntary grace,
And soueraine fauour towards chastity,
Doe succour send to her distressed cace:
So much high God doth innocence embrace. (III.viii.291-5)

The narrator slyly describes the divine intervention as protecting chastity because it “doth
innocence embrace.” Similar to Apollo’s embrace of Daphne’s bark, Proteus’s embrace
of the innocent female body reads as a threat as much as a form of protection. Thus,
Proteus’s “soueraine fauour towards chastity” threatens to replicate Apollo’s. Proteus
responds to Florimell and immediately drives his chariot to her rescue “when those
pittifull outcries he heard,/ Through all the seas so ruefully resound” (III.viii.30.5-6). But
Proteus’s initial efforts to protect Florimell quickly transform into efforts to rape her as
he becomes one more in the long list of male characters who pursue her. The reader
thereby learns that the representatives of the gods in this portion of The Faerie Queene
act more like the rapist Apollo than Daphne’s father, Peneus.
Spenser continues to imitate Ovid’s story as Proteus’s abduction arrests
Florimell’s fleeing but fails to allow him access to her chaste body. Proteus’s “rescue”
stalls Florimell’s flight and benumbs her spirits in a way that mimics the “heavy
numbness” that seizes Daphne’s limbs as she changes into the laurel in the
Metamorphoses (torpor gravis occupat artus, 548). But Florimell’s body does not
change, and she remains inaccessible to Proteus:
For her faint heart was with the frozen cold
Benumbd so inly, that her wits nigh fayld,
77

And all her senses with abashment quite were quayld. (III.viii.34.7-10)

Even with Florimell’s fleeing stalled and her body numb, Proteus cannot succeed.
Spenser reveals the god’s ineptitude by having him resort to Apollo’s ineffective
strategies: he “never suffred her to be at rest” and “sometimes he boasted, that a God he
hight” (III.viii.39.1-2,7).
104
When his Apollo-like boasts fail, Proteus enacts the
metamorphosis of his own body as an attempt to access Florimell. Spenser revises the
story of the fleeing female so that the pursuer, and not the chaste female, experiences the
metamorphosis.
105
As Proteus changes into a giant, a fiend, a centaur, a storm, Spenser’s
story underlines Florimell’s own constancy.
What separates Florimell from Daphne is that her chastity lies completely in her
self. It is Florimell, not the divine intervention, that regulates access to her body. In fact,
Spenser emphasizes this difference by stressing that Florimell is the sole agent of
resistance against Proteus. In Ovid’s story, a “thin bark closes up Daphne’s breast”; but
Florimell resists Proteus because she commands her own body, “so firmely she had
sealed vp her brest” (III.viii.39.5, emphasis mine). Florimell does not need a
metamorphosis to save her; her bodily self control, previously demonstrated by her
amazing endurance in flight, is able to seal off her body from the most ardent of

104
As I discussed in the previous chapter, Ovid presents Apollo as ridiculous for delivering his credentials
on the run; he calls out to Daphne: “nescis, temeraria, nescis,/ quem fugias, ideoque fugis: mihi Delphica
tellus / et Claros et Tenedos Patareaque regia servit;/ Iuppiter est genitor; per me, quod eritque fuitque/
estque, patet” Metamorphoses, 1.514-518 .
105
In her analysis of the tapestries that Britomart views in Busyrane’s house, Elizabeth Bellamy observes
that the “tappets present a world of sexual violence in which Ovidian transformation (most ominously
within Spenser’s book of chastity) is an option only for the male gods, not their female victims . . . One
reason why Amoret’s chastity is symptomatic is because Ovidian metamorphosis does not intervene to save
her.” Elizabeth J. Bellamy, “Waiting for Hymen: Literary History as ‘Symptom’ in Spenser and Milton,”
English Literary Studies 64.2 (1997): 405.
78

pursuers.
106
Just as it is Florimell’s “feare [that] gaue her wings”
107
when she outpaces
the hyena, Florimell’s dedicaton to chastity allows her to defend herself against the
sexual assaults without divine intervention or bodily transformation. The scene of
Florimell’s autonomous resistance to Proteus and protection of her own chastity functions
as an alternative to other episodes in The Faerie Queene where Spenser displays male
domination over female sexuality.
108

Spenser rewrites chastity as an active virtue controlled by the female mind and
body that looks like Elizabeth’s virginity with a difference. As he adds to his picture of
chastity by valorizing female speed, Spenser negotiates the complex relationship between
the tradition of Catholic virginity and the value of Protestant chastity. Spenser’s focus
on female motion repeatedly suggests that stillness runs contrary to his definition of
chastity. The virgin woman who resembles the motionless tree does not hold a prominent
place in The Faerie Queene;
109
Spenser belittles the tradition of praising “fixed”
virginity. In Florimell, the fleeing female who avoids (or escapes) transformation into a
stationary figure, Spenser imagines lively chastity in motion. By emphasizing the
equation between female speed and chastity, Spenser argues that chastity involves the
embodied action of chased/chaste females.

106
Florimell’s ability to seal up her own breast also stands out in relief against the vulnerability of Amoret
whose heart is “drawne forth, and in a siluer basin layed,/ Quite transfixed with a deadly dart, / And in her
bloud yet steeming fresh embayd” (III.xii.21.2-4).
107
Immediately after the narrator alludes to Daphne and Myrrha, he describes how Florimell’s “feare gaue
her wings,” suggesting that unlike Daphne and Myrrha who experience literal transformations into trees to
escape their pursuers, Florimell achieves a figurative metamorphosis into a bird with “wings” in on account
of her own chaste response of fear instead of on account of the gods’ intervention.
108
See Susan Frye’s analysis of how the representation of Amoret’s “rape” enforces male control over
female sexuality, even the queen’s.
109
Spenser’s opposition to stillness suggests that he is also figuring chastity in a manner that rejects
comparisons between chaste women and locked rooms or frozen statues.
79

Rejecting the Laurels

With her first eruption onto the page, Florimell poses a challenge to poetic figures
since her horse “fled so fast, that nothing mote him hold,/and scarse them [Arthur and
Guyon] leasure gaue her passing to behold” (III.i.15.8-9). Florimell flies so fast that even
the poet cannot hold her still long enough to detail her beauty directly. Her ability to
escape her potential rapists thereby coincides with her ability to wriggle out of the poetic
technologies aimed at rendering female bodies still and motionless. With the obvious
refusal of slowing Florimell down in metamorphosis or poetic blazons, Spenser distances
his poetry from the violence enacted by the poets who preceed him.
The first attempt to blazon Florimell echoes and then conspicuously departs from
the extended blazon of Belphoebe in Book II. Both Belphoebe and Florimell burst forth
onto the page, their sudden movements perceived as threatening by the male knights who
stand inactive in the space of the forest. Before Belphoebe’s first appearance, Trompart
and Braggadachio hear a frightening “horne, that shrilled cleare/ Throughout the wood,
that ecchoed againe/And made the forrest ring, as it would riue in twaine” (II.iii.21).
Then, “through the thicke they heard one rudely rush” before they see Belphoebe step
forth out of the woods into their space. In a similar sequence of events, Arthur and
Guyon come into a “forrest wyde, / Whose hideous horror and sad trembling sound/ Full
griesly seem’d” (III.i14) before Florimell rushes forth “All suddenly out of the thickest
brush” (III.i.15).
80

The narrative of the sudden entrances of both of these exemplars of chastity
quickly gives way to poetic blazons of their supernatural beauty. The narrator details
Belphoebe’s beautiful body parts for nine stanzas in the longest blazon of chaste beauty
in all of Spenser’s poem. In its encomiastic praise of the divine-like beauty of Belphoebe
(who stands in for Elizabeth), the blazon lingers on the details of Belphoebe’s cheeks,
eyes, forehead, teeth, lips, eyelids, dress, legs, gilden buskins, weapons, breasts, and
yellow locks. In its excessive lingering, the Petrarchan blazon teeters on the verge of
infringing the sanctity of Belphoebe/Elizabeth’s body. According to Nancy Vickers, the
Petrarchan dismemberment of the female body works as a strategy for domination over it.
Spenser’s narrator betrays awareness of the potential violence of his own blazon when he
pulls back in the middle of the blazon to ask: “How shall fraile pen descriue her heauenly
face/ For feare through want of skill her beauty to disgrace?” (II.iii.25). Louis Montrose
consequently argues that “Spenser’s descriptive dismemberment of Belphoebe
conspicuously avoids the danger inhering in the female body.”
110
At the same moment
that he asserts the insufficiency of his pen, the narrator simultaneously discloses the
possibility that the pen might aim for inappropriate power over the body of
Belphoebe/Elizabeth.
Even though the blazon ultimately falls short of endangering the female body, the
narrative progression from the blazon to Braggadachio’s assault of Belphoebe’s body
implies that the blazon does participate indirectly in the physical assault upon her body.
Almost immediately after the narrator’s poetic blazon, Braggadachio “gan burne in filthy
lust, and leaping light,/ Thought in his bastard arms her to embrace” (II.iii.42). As Nancy

110
Louis Montrose, “Elizabethan Subject,” 328.
81

Vickers argues, the blazon acts as an invitation to rape.
111
It works as a means for holding
the female body still enough to be vulnerable to sexual assault. The narrator must hold
Belphoebe incredibly still in order to offer the literary vision of minute details such as the
“golden bendes, which were entayld/ With curious antickes, and full faire aumayld” that
are on her golden buskins (II.iii.27). In other words, the process of the blazon requires
that the female body be held captive for the length of the description. Coincidentally, the
time spent by the narrator in dismembering Belphoebe’s beauteous parts provides
Braggadachio with the time he needs to muster the courage to assault her body. The
blazon therefore provides the opportunity for attempted rape by stalling Belphoebe’s
movement through the woods. She rushes forth into the forest, next she is slowed by the
blazon, Braggadachio assaults her, and then almost immediately after, she “fled away
apace” (II.iii.42). Thus, the narrative blazon that is poised in between her rushing flight
works distinctly as the poetic means of slowing her down to the point where her body is
exposed to the rude threat of rape.
In contrast to the blazon that stalls Belphoebe’s body, the poetic praise and
dismemberment of Florimell’s body ends prematurely when it digresses into a simile for
her exceptional speed. The narrative of Florimell’s flight recalls the scene of
Belphoebe’s sudden entrance, poetic blazon, and subjection to attempted rape, but the
narrator of Florimell’s introduction conspicuously departs the from its precedent in the
midst of the poetic blazon. Beginning like the Petrarchan blazon of Belphoebe’s lily-
white face, golden hemmed dress, and her “yellow locks,” the initial description of

111
Vickers makes this argument in many contexts, including in the “’The blazon of sweet beauty’s best’:
Shakespeare’s Lucrece” where she writes: “Rape is the price Lucrece pays for having been described,” 102.
82

Florimell details the whiteness of her face that “did seeme as cleare as Christall stone,”
her garments that were “wrought of beaten gold,” and her “golden locks” (III.i.15). But
before the reader can settle into the familiar position of lingering on the details of each of
Florimell’s beauteous parts, the blazon gives way to the simile of the “blazing starre”
whose “hearie beames, and flaming lockes dispred” (III.i.16). Unlike Belphoebe whose
threatening presence is diminished by the power of the poetic blazon, Florimell resists the
trope of dismemberment with movement that can be described only by a simile for a star.
This star inspires fear since “at sight whereof the people stand aghast:/ But the sage
wisard telles, as he has red/ That it importunes death and dolefull drerihed.” In fact,
instead of succumbing to the motionlessness of the blazoned body, Florimell’s speed
reverses the effect of the blazon as her viewers become immobilized as they “gaze[...]
after her a while” (III.i.17).
By featuring Florimell’s ability to fly faster than his poetry with the blazing starre
simile, Spenser announces that his poetic representation of Florimell differs from the
tradition of poetic violence to the immobilized female body. Unlike Belphoebe,
Florimell escapes the violence of the pen. In the blazon of Belphoebe’s body, Spenser
utilizes the Petrarchan mode of praising part of the female body by expressing that it
functions as an apt writing surface. Belphoebe has an ivory forehead that
like a broad table did it selfe dispred,
For Loue his loftie triumphes to engraue,
And write the battels of his great godhed:
All good and honour might therein be red. (II.iii.24)
The poem praises Belphoebe for her superior beauty at the same time that it reduces her
to a “table” for love to write upon. Accordingly, Belphoebe’s beauty and honor depend
83

upon the “readings” of her subjects and the writings of “Love,” who is figured as a poet
who engraves his triumphs on women’s bodies.
At the same time that the narrative of Florimell’s flight rejects the tale of
metamorphosis into the static laurel tree, it also resists the poetic techniques that Spenser
presents as enacting violence on the female body. Scholars have long attended to the
ways that Spenser critiques Petrarchan conceits in his representation of Busyrane’s
violent “penning” of Amoret. They also frequently point out that as Spenser critiques
Petrarchan modes of violence, he re-enacts them.
112
Harry Berger, Jr. observes that
Spenser is trapped by the poetic forms that he inherits. He writes that Spenser
“consciously and conspicuously revises not only a literary and cultural view of love but
also a literary and cultural view of woman. The problem [is]: how to redress the balance
in a culture whose images of woman and love, whose institutions affecting women and
love, were products of the male imagination.”
113
Spenser is bound by the limits of the
male imaginations that preceed his own cultural conditions. I argue that his
representation of Florimell embraces a new means for the imaginative freeing of both
poetry and the female body from the vicious threat of rape: he puts he female body in
motion in poetry.
Florimell’s ability to wriggle out of blazons allows her to escape from more than
minor forms of physical assault, such as the one experienced by the immobilized
Belphoebe at the hands of the foolish Braggadachio. More significantly, Florimell’s

112
The problematic poetic connection between Spenser’s poem and Petrarch’s Rime Sparse is exemplified
in Ralegh’s commendatory sonnet that reads, “Methought I saw the grave where Laura lay/ All suddently I
saw the Faery Queene: / At whose approach the soule of Petrarke wept.”
113
Qutd in Cheney, 321.
84

perpetual flight frees her from the kind of abuse suffered by Amoret at the hands of the
poet-figure, Busyrane. Maureen Quilligan’s oft-cited explanation of Spenser’s
representation of the limitations of Petrarchan metaphor is worth quoting at length since
it forms the foundation for much of the scholarship that has followed. She argues,
Through a multifaceted pun on one word, ‘pen,’ which completes an extensive
pattern of parodic criticism of Petrarchan conventions, Spenser demonstrates the
imprisoning nature of this way of talking about love. The climactic episode in the
House of Busyrane reveals the evil magus sitting before Amoret writing magic
words with her heart’s blood. This surreal and horrible picture is a collection of
Petrarchan conceits, literalized. More importantly, however, the image of
Busyrane writing the ‘strange characters of his art’ with her blood, is the picture
of the sadistic sonneteer who enacts Scudamour’s lament, that Busyrane had long
been allowed within his castle ‘so cruelly to pen’ Amoret (3.11.10-11). With the
pun on ‘pen,’ meaning both to imprison and to write, Spenser literalizes the
dangers of Petrarchism; penned in passivity, suffering the torments of passion,
Amoret is imprisoned in a metaphorical way of talking about love.
114

Like Belphoebe whose flight is stalled by a Petrarchan blazon, Amoret is bound,
motionless and her “small wast [is] girt round with yron bands,/ Unto a brasen pillour, by
the which she stands” (III.xii.30). Even though Amoret does not experience the reprieve
(or punishment) of metamorphosis, she resembles Daphne since her hands and body are
bound to the pillor with painful restraints. Amoret suffers, in part, because she cannot
move, because Busyrane’s Petrarchan conceits have no imagination for autonomous
female motion. In fact, both Busyrane and Amoret are caught in an emblematic stasis of
the torments of chastity. As Elizabeth Bellamy observes, “rather than seeking ‘the
pleasure of her body,’ Busyrane seeks a ringside seat for the observance of the visual
torments of her body—in the process, creating a kind of weird space of Lacanian

114
Maureen Quilligan, The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1979), 84-85.
85

intersubjectivity in which the enchanter seems content to watch the pained Amoret
watching him watching her be chaste.”
115

Although Amoret is freed from this tormenting stasis when Britomart forces
Busyrane to reverse his spells, her passivity results in her later abduction and rape by the
figure of Lust in Book IV. After she is rescued by Britomart, Amoret’s inability to move
her self in flight functions as an allegory for her inferior form of inactive chastity, for
“whiles faire Amoret, of nought affeard,/ Walkt thorugh the wood, for pleasure, or for
need” she is “unwares . . . snatched up from the ground” (IV.vii.4).
116
Only later when
Amoret learns to run like Florimell does she escape from Lust’s cave. Spenser connects
the power of Amoret’s flight undeniably to Florimell by repeating the allusions to Myrrha
and Daphne that he employs in Book III to describe Florimell’s flight from the hyena. As
Amoret flies in Florimell’s footsteps,
Nor hedge, nor ditch, nor hill, nor dale she staies,
But ouerleapes them all, . . .
And euermore when with regardfull sight
She looking backe, espies that griesly wight
Approaching nigh, she gins to mend her pace,
And makes her feare a spur to hast her flight:
More swift then Myrrh or Daphne in her race,
Or any of the Thracian Nimphes in saluage chase. (IV.vii.22)

The virgin who suffers the most at the hands of poetry in the Faerie Queene escapes for
good only when she learns to run like Florimell. “Swifter than Myrrh or Daphne,”
Amoret joins Florimell in action. In fact Amoret’s repetition of Florimell’s flight offers a
means through which readers can re-evaluate flight as something other than blind fear. It

115
Bellamy, 406.
116
Barnard notes that the vulnerability of female bodies in the Spenserian woods echoes the images in book
six of Virgil’s Aeneid where those who die for love become wanderers in a dark wood in the underworld,
103.
86

becomes the answer to the problem of Amoret’s multiple captivities in the poem. With
the repetition of the allusions to Myrrha and Daphne at the moment when Amoret finally
frees herself from her second captor, Spenser underlines his representation of Florimell’s
flight as an alternative to the poetic figures that imprison and threaten to violate the
female body.
In his most direct consideration of the relationship between Florimell and the
poet, Spenser asserts that he is not like Petrarch at the same time that he exposes a keen
awareness of the abuse suffered by chaste females at the hands of poets. In the
introduction to canto viii, the poem expresses compassion for Florimell’s poetic torment
since
causelesse of her owne accord
This gentle Damzell, whom I write vpon,
Should plonged be in such affliction,
Without all hope of comfort or reliefe,
That sure I weene the hardest hart of stone
Would hardly find to aggrauate her griefe;
For misery craues rather mercie, then repriefe. (III.viii.1)

The lines are frequently read as an indication of Spenser’s boasting at his complicity in
Florimell’s pain. They also indicate a clear desire to free Florimell from her “affliction”
and to offer her some form of mercy. Ironically, the poem provides these by freeing her
to run over many additional pages of the text.
Spenser distances his poetry from the threat of the rape of his most prominent
fleeing female by establishing similes as the primary method of representing her
movement. I argue that Spenser declares his unwillingness to hold her still long enough
to capture her in verse by resorting to similes in most of his accounts of Florimell’s flight.
87

Spenser describes Florimell through direct similes using like or as more than any other
female character in Book III. Most importantly, Spenser employs similes in order
specifically to describe the movement of the chaste female. In order to allow the reader
to understand Florimell’s flight without slowing her down, Spenser compares Florimell in
motion to a blazing star, a hare, a dove, a hynd, Daphne, Myrrha, a partridge. . . The
prevalence of Spenser’s use of similes for Florimell is best evidenced by the initial word
like that introduces canto vii. Spenser frequently introduces the subject of his cantos via
a comparison, but canto vii, the one that features Florimell’s flight and plight, is the only
one in all of Book III that begins with the word like. By beginning only this canto with
an explicit comparison, Spenser establishes the simile as the rhetorical device associated
most significantly with the fleeing woman.
Spenser transforms the predator/prey simile that he inherits from Ovid so that it
accentuates Florimell’s fearful solitude even more than Daphne’s. As demonstrated in
the first chapter, Ovid’s invitation to shift the focus to Daphne during the hare/hound
simile asks readers to entertain the idea of the independence of Daphne’s own movement.
As Spenser echoes Ovid’s narrative strategies, he accepts this invitation to depict the
independence and isolation of the fleeing woman as he valorizes her chastity. Spenser
begins canto vii in Book III with:
Like as an Hynd forth singled from the heard,
That hath escaped from a rauenous beast,
Yet flyes away of her owne feet affeard,
And euery leafe, that shaketh with the least
Mumure of winde, her terror hath encreast;
So fled faire Florimell from her vaine fear,
Long after she from peril was releast. (III.vii.1.1-7)

88

Unlike Ovid’s simile of the chase where the reader shifts back and forth from the
perspective of the hound to the hare, Spenser isolates the prey in a manner that stresses
her solitary experience. In Spenser, the experience belongs entirely to the prey and the
simile moves the reader’s focus away from the pursuers to the experience of the solitary
fleeing woman. While the hare in Ovid’s simile reacts to the hound that breaths on his
heels, the hynd in Spenser is crucially all alone, “singled out from the heard” and
“releast” from the peril of the predator.
117

While her “vaine fear” may render Florimell a foolish animal, it also provides a
means for Spenser to separate the virtue of chastity from the vice of attempted rape.
Since, as Mark Amsler observes, in romance “good knights don’t rape women,” Spenser
widens the distance between her and any pursuers in order to minimize the seriousness of
the threat of rape in his romance. Within his simile, Spenser distances Florimell’s flight
from her pursuers even more drastically than Ovid separated Daphne from Apollo.
Florimell flees, not because of outside stimuli, but rather “from her [own] vaine fear.” In
fact, the hynd that stands in for Florimell in this simile is so alone that it flies away from
its own feet, acting out an extreme version of the independence of female flight and
female chastity. Here, Spenser avoids mimicking Apollo who chased Daphne so
aggressively with his own threatening similes that he resembled a hound stretching out
his jaws upon its prey’s heels. Thus, Spenser severs his fleeing woman from her pursuer
and frees the poet/narrator from re-presenting (or re-enacting) Apollo’s vice of masking
rape with similes.

117
Spenser’s pun on “heard” for “herd” suggests that Florimell’s isolation also prevents her from hearing
and points to flight as a mechanism against poetic pursuits that I consider in the next chapter on aural
insubordination.
89

The similes force Florimell farther and farther away from the poet and the reader
and stress that that she cannot be physically or poetically reached by anyone who chases
her. Similes are the poetic mode most fitting for Spenser’s fleeing woman since they
establish the chaste woman as one who is inaccessible both to the characters, the readers,
and even the poets who pursue her. Her independence or uncontrollability may be
troubling, but the distance created between her and all others is what is most important
for Spenser’s denouncement of the tropes that bind poetic triumph to rape. The words
like or as in the similes position Florimell as similar to an animal, object, or character, but
they also establish an insurmountable distance to be crossed as she moves within the
rhetorical framework toward them. Even though she may be transgressing physical
boundaries, the distance created by her moving across the page is crucial to her
allegorical role of chastity.
In his 1569 Arte of English Poesie, George Puttneham’s defines metaphor as the
“figure of transporte” and reveals an early modern proclivity for considering metaphors
as figures that denote linguistic motion; a metaphor works by moving one word toward
another.
118
That Spenser is attuned to this connection between similes and transporte is
clear from the predominant use of similes to describe Florimell’s movement as opposed
to her appearance or virtue. Yet, since a metaphor, or simile, moves one word toward
another that does not belong in its place, it only helps in moving an object, person, or idea
toward a destination; by definition, it is not able to help that object, person, or idea hit its

118
As Patricia Parker explains, metaphors in early modern rhetoric handbooks also denote a sense of
substitution or usurpation. I argue that Spenser’s association of the simile with Florimell reveals an
understanding of similes as figures of transport more than figures of usurpation. See Parker, Literary Fat
Laides.
90

destination. It is this sense of reaching and never arriving that makes the simile the
perfect figure for the fleeing woman who embodies chastity. Chastity for Florimell
entails perpetual motion and the creation of expanding distance that positions the female
body away from poetic pursuers.
By imitating both Ovid and Ariosto’s similes, Spenser adds layers upon layers to
the string of comparisons that widen the gap between Florimell and her pursuers.
Florimell is not only like a hynd; she is actually like a hynd . . .who is like the goat/fawn,
who is like Angelica, who is like Daphne, who is like a hare. This multiple layering of
referents explains Florimell’s character, but it also works to push her beyond Spenser’s
own reach. The comparisons between Florimell and the figures of the fleeing women
who precede her, such as Daphne, Myrrha, and Angelia, release Florimell into the
alternative and earlier narratives over whose interpretations Spenser has limited control.
The similes essentially drop her off into the world of Daphne, Myrrha, and Angelica
whose fleeing does not bear the same pressures as Florimell’s allegorical movements.
I propose that it is specifically through the excessiveness of the multiple layers of
the similes and comparisons that Spenser encourages Florimell to run away from the
poet’s control. With his endless string of comparisons that create a compelling sense of
movement of the words that describe Florimell’s chaste speed, Spenser showcases his
refusal to create a single simile that matches his purpose, or more accurately, that hits the
mark. Similes actually open up space for negotiating chastity; they mark a starting
location—Florimell’s flight—and open up the space between this flight and other
referents where the poet can examine how her moving body relates to her chastity.
91

Spenser thereby uses the risky similes to represent how the virtue of chastity depends
upon the body moving that is always just out of reach.
92

Chapter Four
An Abnormal Pattern of Pursuit:
The Ovidian Chase in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream

The story shall be changed:
Apollo flies and Daphne holds the chase.
—Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Fare thee well nymph. Ere he do leave this grove,
Thou shalt fly him, and he shall seek thy love.
—Oberon’s response in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

The story of Apollo and Daphne’s chase is glaringly absent from most critical
responses to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Even though it is one of the Ovidian stories
directly named in Shakespeare’s play, scholarship tends to consider the general concept
of pursuit without consideration of the particulars from the story that Shakespeare
inherits from Ovid. In spite of numerous analyses of other Ovidian stories that shape A
Midsummer Night’s Dream, the story of Apollo and Daphne has not received much
attention even by critics interested in the play’s gendered pairings.
119
This lacuna in
Shakespeare scholarship is most surprising because the story of the Ovidian chase is at
the center of the construction, or deconstruction, of the play’s gendered identities. In fact,
performances of the play’s middle acts in the liminal forest are compelling specifically on
account of the gender trouble of the Ovidian chase.
Helena and Oberon’s direct allusions to Apollo and Daphne demand a critical and
detailed comparison between performances of Shakespeare’s drama and the nuances of
Ovid’s text. Oberon’s response to Helena’s lament— “fare thee well nymph. Ere he do

119
A.B. Taylor’s list of Ovidian stories that bear weight on A Midsummer Night’s Dream include:
“Pyramus and Thisbe, Ino and Athams, Salmacis and Hermaphroditus.” A.B. Taylor, “Ovid’s Myths and
the Unsmooth Course of Love,” in Shakespeare and the Classics, eds. Charles Marindale and A.B. Taylor
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 49-65.
93

leave this grove,/ Thou shalt fly him, and he shall seek thy love” (2.1.245-6)—reads as a
stage direction for the actors playing Helena and Demetrius to follow the physical
footsteps of Ovid’s Apollo and Daphne.
120
The allusions act as commands for the actors
to translate Ovid’s text onto the stage with their running bodies, infusing dramatic breath
into Ovid’s poem. Their allusions also announce an implicit challenge: can
Shakespeare’s play fulfill Oberon’s promise of making the dramatic characters Helena
and Demetrius run like Apollo and Daphne? This challenge is crucial for interpretations
of the play’s construction of gendered categories since Ovid’s story is central in early
modern debates about female virtues. In other words, the extent to which the actors in A
Midsummer Night’s Dream succeed in embodying the scenes, values, and tropes from
Ovid’s text weighs heavily upon the plays’ gender politics.
The translation of the Ovidian poetry to the stage accentuates the ways that
Helena departs from Daphne. On the one hand, Helena eventually becomes as silent as
Daphne within the tree. She speaks only two lines after waking from the dream in act
four, and she remains on-stage without speech for the entire last act. Like Daphne’s, her
consent and active participation are rendered almost insignificant to the patriarchal order
of the story’s conclusion. Yet, unlike Daphne’s, Helena’s silence does not follow a
breathtaking metamorphosis: Daphne is muted by the bark of the laurel, Helena by an
off-stage marriage. The dramatic genre allows Shakespeare’s version of the chase to end
in a marriage that takes place out of the audience’s view. Thus, while poetry demands

120
As John Barton explains in Playing Shakespeare (1984): “Shakespeare’s text is full of hidden hints to
the actor. When an actor becomes aware of them, he will find that Shakespeare himself starts to direct
him.” Qtd in Lisa J. Moore’s “Transporting Helena to Form and Dignity” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream:
Critical Essays, ed. Dorothea Kehler (New York: Routledge, 2001), 456.
94

that Ovid describe Daphne’s silencing metamorphosis, the play downplays the
significance of Helena’s lost voice and oppressive marriage by pushing the moment of
her transformation off-stage. Helena is hardly remembered for her silence or wifely
behavior in the same way that Daphne is immortalized by her metamorphosis into the
tree. Most audiences instead recall Helena’s independent desires, saucy tongue, and
active legs. Thus, while both the chase and the metamorphosis often signify crucially for
interpretations of Daphne’s story, the chase counts most for Helena.
Accordingly, A Midsummer Night’s Dream prioritizes the significance of the
peripatetic chase over the teleological resolution. My argument about the prominence of
the chase for readings of the play’s gender politics is supported by Catherine Belsey’s
persuasive argument against purely teleological readings that focus primarily on the
diminished role of female characters at the end of Shakespeare’s comedies. She writes
that “the plays are more than their endings, and the heroines become wives only after they
have been shown to be something altogether more singular—because more plural.”
121

Inspired by Belsey’s analysis, I argue that the dramatization of Ovid’s story of Apollo
and Daphne’s chase vexes the play’s ability to settle into the simple gender binaries of
active, desiring males and passive, desired females. The incorporation of the Ovidian
chase in A Midsummer Night’s Dream proves to be more than the simple means to
achieve the patriarchal marriages at the end of the play; instead it opens up opportunities

121
Belsey, 647. Frances Dolan presents a similar argument in her introduction to As You Like It, writing:
“Ultimately, Rosalind surrenders her disguise and submits herself to father, husband, and a social order she
has worked hard to revitalize and restore, rather than overturn. Yet the conclusion of the story cannot
wholly forget the middle,” xl, emphasis mine.
95

for exploring the plurality of embodied gendered roles as alternatives to the constraints of
gendered categories.
By attending to the dramatization of Ovid’s chase on the early modern stage, this
chapter investigates how A Midsummer Night’s Dream complicates the “standard” rape
story of active, powerful man chases and then rapes passive, objectified female. I argue
that Shakespeare’s play breathes life into Ovid’s story of the chase as a means for
rethinking patterns of gendered behavior. The sections that follow examine four crucial
ways that the play negotiates the terms of Ovid’s chase for the young Athenians on the
dramatic stage. The first section argues that A Midsummer Night’s Dream invokes the
specific tale of Apollo and Daphne because it offers an opportunity to stage an abnormal
pattern of pursuit. The subsequent section lingers along with Oberon in the middle of the
play, analyzing the play’s investment in the bodily deferral of heterosexual contact, rape,
and/or marriage. The next section presents the chase as a liminal experience in which
clear-cut categories of male and female bodies are suspended. Finally, the last section
considers how the unique demands of embodied performance contribute to the gender
confusion of the liminal chase. I argue that the staging of the chase through the fictional
forest functions as one of the elements of Shakespearean comedy that, as Catherine
Belsey argues, calls “into question that set of relations between terms which proposes as
inevitable an antithesis between masculine and feminine, men and women.”
122
The
chase is a key phenomenon that troubles, instead of merely reverses, the very terms of

122
Catherine Belsey. “Disrupting Sexual Difference: Meaning and Gender in the Comedies,” in
Shakespeare: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1945-2000, ed. Russ McDonald (Oxford: Blackwell,
2004), 633-649.
96

masculinity and femininity, resisting the fixed identity of female characters as properly
submissive and still.

Abnormal Patterns of Pursuit

Attention to the embodied performance of the Ovidian chase in A Midsummer
Night’s Dream offers an alternative to New Historicist and feminist readings that claim
that Oberon’s plan for Helena to become the one who flees relegates her to a position of
permanent female submission. In his oft-cited critique of Oberon’s plan to make Helena
flee Demetrius, Louis Montrose has famously argued that “Oberon’s response is neither
to extinguish desire nor to make it mutual but rather to restore the normal pattern of
pursuit.”
123
Montrose’s examination of the play in light of Elizabethan politics concludes
that if Demetrius chases Helena in the same way that Apollo attempts to rape Daphne the
play reaffirms a patriarchal order. Montrose includes the reordering of Helena and
Demetrius as one of the successful processes in the play “by which the feminine pride
and power manifested in Amazon warriors, possessive mothers, unruly wives, and willful
daughters are brought under the control of lords and husbands.”
124

I agree with Montrose’s suggestion that Oberon devotes his efforts more to the
pursuit in the forest than to the alignment of Demetrius and Helena’s affections. Yet, I

123
Montrose, Louis. The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of Elizabethan Theatre
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 161. Italics mine.
124
Montrose, 161. Montrose’s sentiments echo Shirley Garner’s claims that “the renewal at the end of the
play affirms patriarchal order and hierarchy, insisting that the power of women must be circumscribed.”
Shirley Garner. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream: ‘Jack shall have Jill;/Nought shall go ill,’” in Women’s
Studies 9 (1981): 47-63.
97

argue that the sense of pursuit in the play is anything but “the normal pattern.”
Montrose’s analysis of Oberon’s response to Helena’s invocation of Apollo and Daphne
assumes too readily that the “normal pattern of pursuit” reduces the “chased” female to
the category of the passive and submissive object. This assumption ignores the gendered
tension embedded within Ovid’s first-century version of the tale and rests on an
understanding of the pattern of pursuit in Ovid’s story as static and monolithic.
125

While Ovid’s Metamorphoses does involve repetitions of specific patterns
involving the aggression of male gods and the submission of female nymphs or mortals,
the story of Apollo’s failure to catch the swift-footed Daphne challenges assumptions
about stable categories of gendered behavior. Apollo’s inability to capture Daphne can
be read as a sign of his emasculated impotence, and Daphne’s willfulness places her
outside of the category of proper female obedience. In fact, early modern English
debates about whether Daphne’s flight is a sign of female virtue or vice demonstrates that
she fails to fit into a neat category of femininity. She is variously: the exemplar of female
devotion to chastity, the aberrant female who actively lures Apollo toward folly, or the
representative of excessive pride in beauty and virginity. For early modern readers of
Ovid, Daphne escapes reduction to a consistent category of proper female behavior. The
multiple interpretations debated by early modern English readers about the motivations,
causes, and implications of Daphne’s flight away from Apollo reveal that clear categories
of gendered behavior can not be extracted from mere references to Ovid’s story.
126

125
See Chapter One for my argument about how Ovid complicates Daphne’s status as a victim and invites
his own readers to identify with Daphne’s agency and independent desires.
126
See previous chapters for a thorough examination of the multiple early modern English interpretations
of the female virtues and vices exemplified by Daphne’s flight.
98

The story of Apollo and Daphne functions as an example of an abnormal pattern
of pursuit for A Midsummer Night’s Dream specifically since Daphne escapes rape.
Unlike Jove who succeeds in raping Io in spite of her flight, Europa in spite of her fear,
Callisto in spite of her protests, and many other young virgins in spite of challenging
circumstances, Apollo fails to overcome Daphne. The pattern of pursuit in their story is
abnormal specifically because it presents the rare possibility of female subversion and
escape. In his book Shakespeare and Ovid, Jonathan Bate observes that most characters
in the Metamorphoses tend to find reprieve only after experiences of extreme
violence.
127
Other scholars, such as Amy Richlin, classify the usual pattern of pursuit in
the Metamorphoses as follows: aggressive male god sees female nymph or mortal, she
flees, he rapes her.
128
Since the story of Apollo and Daphne does not follow this pattern,
it marks Daphne as the exceptional female who resists both her rapist and simple
categorization. Even though Daphne experiences a traumatic transformation into the
laurel tree, her escape from Apollo puts her in the position of active resister instead of
passive victim of sexual violence. In fact, as I argue in Chapter One, even Daphne’s
metamorphosis into the tree does not prevent her body from continuing its movement
away from Apollo’s embraces. Thus, Daphne represents the exception whose active flight
successfully thwarts a rape that might reinforce patriarchal patterns.
By naming the foremost example of escaped rape from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, A
Midsummer Night’s Dream wards off the threat of rape. In fact, Oberon’s decision to
intervene on Helena’s behalf contrasts directly with Demetrius’s threats of rape and

127
Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 120.
128
Richlin.
99

insistence on patriarchal order. Even though he flees from Helena, Demetrius figures the
woods as Ovidian forests where female characters tend to be especially vulnerable to
sexual assault. Sounding more like Tereus than the god of poetry, Demetrius tells
Helena:
You do impeach your modesty too much
To leave the city and commit yourself
Into the hands of one that loves you not,
To trust the opportunity of night
And the ill counsel of a desert place
With the rich worth of your virginity. (2.1.214-219)

Demetrius momentarily plays the role of the aggressive male as he attempts to scare
Helena with, “I shall do thee mischief in the wood” (2.1.236). He threatens to put her in
the position of the rape victim, a victim who is violated specifically through a denial of
her voice. With its allusions to Apollo and Daphne, the play recasts Demetrius in the
position of Apollo, the failed poet/rapist, instead of as Tereus, the vile adulterer/rapist.
The play thereby works against rape and the patriarchal values of male dominance it
supports.
Oberon’s reference to Demetrius as the “disdainful youth” proves that Oberon
views the conflict between Helena and Demetrius through her perspective.
129

Accordingly, Oberon’s intervention asks the audience to pity the desiring female and to
condemn the scornful male whose “wrongs,” according to Helena, “do set a scandal on
[the female] sex” (2.1.240).
130
By voicing his intentions to act on Helena’s behalf
immediately after she laments that women cannot “fight for love, as men may do”

129
In contrast, he addresses his good intentions for Helena’s well-being with “fare thee well, nymph,” and
he describes her to Puck as the “sweet Athenian lady” (2.1.245, 260).
130
In this way, Oberon invokes Ovid via his allusion to the Apollo and Daphne story and also through his
sympathies toward women that are reminiscent of Ovid’s position in defense of women in the Heroides.
100

(2.1.241) and after Demetrius’s threats of rape, Oberon supports Helena’s accusations
against the injustice of limitations imposed upon the female sex.
131
The audience might
laugh at Helena with derision for her pathetic declaration that she is Demetrius’s spaniel
whom he can “use,” “spurn,” “strike,” “neglect,” and “lose,” but Oberon’s endorsement
of her perspective demonstrates that her plight is worthy of sincere pity and regard.
132

Oberon’s sympathy for Helena also contrasts directly with the law of Athens that
demands the female silence and submission associated with the normal patterns of
pursuit. The problems with which the comedy begins are rooted in the resistance of the
figures of male authority to the independent desires of the female characters.
133
The
patriarchal authority in Athens is so indifferent to female choices that Hermia is
compelled to apologize for the mere act of speaking in the first act.
134
Hermia’s voice is
so confined by the patriarchal pressures in Athens that Oberon’s attentiveness to Helena’s
voice is remarkable. Oberon announces his own plan in terms that mimic Helena’s words.
After she cries the lines with which this chapter begins—“The wildest hath not such a
heart as you./ Run when you will. The story shall be changed: / Apollo flies and Daphne
holds the chase” (2.1.229-31)—Oberon grants such credence to Helena’s perspective and

131
The nineteenth century prevalence of female actors playing Oberon as a direct response to the feminist
leanings of Oberon’s position in Shakespeare’s text. In 19
th
century performances, the role of Oberon was
played so frequently by a woman that when a man played the role in Barker’s production in 1914 it was
only the second time in seventy-four years . Gary Jay Williams, Our Moonlight Revels: A Midsummer
Night’s Dream (Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 1997), 153.
132
The play additionally invites the audience to identify with Helena since she is the only one of the lovers
who speaks soliloquies.
133
Sarah Carter notes the “dark misogynistic undertones of the playful text” when she observes that:
“Hermia’s choice of lover, Hippolyta’s military resistance, and Titania’s refusal to give up the Indian
changeling all constitute disobedience to the patriarch and all are punished for it.” par.20
133
Sarah Carter,
“From the ridiculous to the sublime: Ovidian and Neoplatonic registers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,”
Early Modern Literary Studies 12.1 (May 2006).
134
Hermia tells the Duke, “I do entreat Your Grace to pardon me./I know not by what power I am made
bold,/Nor how it may concern my modesty/In such a presence here to plead my thoughts;/But I beseech
Your Grace” (1.2.58-62).
101

speech that his next words follow directly from her complaint. He sympathetically
declares, “Fare thee well, nymph. Ere he do leave this grove, / Thou shalt fly him, and he
shall seek thy love” (2.1.245-6). By echoing her word choice and her allusions to Ovid,
Oberon directs the audience’s sympathies toward Helena’s desire, which runs contrary to
the patriarchal law of Athens that has selected Demetrius for Hermia. Accordingly,
Oberon’s pity for Helena stands out in support of the feminist desires that the play
features in its opening scenes. Oberon’s announcement that Helena should flee like
Daphne must be read in consideration of his genuine attempts to prioritize the woman’s
part.

Running Love

A Midsummer Night’s Dream celebrates the chase as a deferral of the
heterosexual pairings more than as a means to proper marriage. With Oberon and Puck’s
assistance, the participants in the chase multiply and running becomes the primary
activity of the lovers and spectacle of sexuality in the play. With his prediction that
Demetrius will chase and Helena will flee, Oberon does not promise anything more than
the continuation of the phenomenon of energized pursuit. Oberon makes no mention of
Demetrius capturing Helena or about their potential for future unification; instead, he
invites the audience to experience the dynamics of young love in terms of the chase,
specifically the highly eroticized Ovidian chase. Oberon therefore defers capture,
potential rape, and/or marriage with his power to compel the young Athenians to run
102

breathlessly across the stage. This deferral depends upon the continuation of the chase
throughout the middle of the play. As long as one of the lovers is in the process of
escaping capture, their running delays the telos of strict gendered categories. The play
invests time in this liminal experience by putting the young lovers into almost constant
motion.
Running functions as the primary indicator of young love in Shakespeare’s play.
Lysander first responds to the oppressive law of Athens by asking Hermia to run away
with him; and Lysander figures love itself as capable of running when he most famously
laments, “the course of true love never did run smooth” (1.1.138). While the play
prescribes running for all the young lovers, Helena is the character most closely
associated with the chase. In fact, Helena enters the play running, turning to dart away
before she utters a single word. The stage direction at 1.1.179s.d. reads “enter Helena,”
and Hermia’s immediate exclamation “God speed, fair Helena! Whither away?” (1.1.180)
indicates that Helena’s first movements on stage are quick steps away from the other
characters. Jay L. Halio’s account of Peter Brook’s famous 1970 production remembers,
“Helena (Frances de la Tour) enters, starts to leave, and is brought back by Hermia.”
135

Lisa Moore, the actress who played Helena in the 1994 production of A Midsummer
Night’s Dream at the Playhouse Theater in Seattle, Washington, describes her
performance of Helena’s first entrance as follows:
After many trial-and-error rehearsals, I decided that as I made my first entrance, I
would be on the way to the court to confront Demetrius and to plead my case
myself, but as I rushed there, I stumbled into the scene between Hermia and
Lysander. In my surprise at intruding on their love scene, I did a multiple take,

135
Jay L Halio, Shakespeare in Performance: A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1994), 59.
103

standing for a second like a deer caught in the headlights, trying to speak, then
running away. Hermia’s “Godspeed, fair Helena! Whither away?” (1.1.180) was
what drew me back into the scene.
136

Even before Helena is caught up in the pursuit of Demetrius for all of act two, the play
offers the actor playing Helena the opportunity to display her youth with her quick and
impulsive feet. Hermia’s valediction, “godspeed, fair Helena ” thus works as a pun since
it names both Hermia’s blessing and Helena’s quickness, or speed. This wordplay that
connects “fairness” and “speed” is the first of many instances in the play that identifies
the fairness of young love with the swiftness of the young feet.
The actors playing the young Athenians must have endurance as well as speed
since they rarely stop running across the stage until Puck literally runs them to sleep in
act four. The first quarto edition, published in 1600, accentuates the role of running in
the play with the rare stage direction for Helena and Demetrius to enter “running” at
2.1.188.
137
In addition, six out of the nine occurrences of the word run in the first quarto
edition of the play (1600) are spoken by the young lovers in reference to their own on-
stage actions. Running becomes so crucial to the characterization of the young Athenians
that the puissance of the love juice is evidenced specifically by the fact that it causes
them to run after each other. After Puck squeezes the juice onto Lysander’s eyes, its
power is revealed when Helena awakens Lysander and he starts mid-sentence with: “And
run through fire I will for thy sweet sake” (2.2.109). The proof of the transformation of

136
Moore, 461.
137
Only two other plays by Shakespeare use the word run more frequently than AMND: Merry Wives of
Windsor has ten instances of the word run and Romeo and Juliet has thirteen. According to the editors of
the Norton Shakespeare the dates are as follows: AMND, 1594; Romeo and Juliet, 1595; Merry Wives,
1597. The proximity of the composition dates of these three plays leads to speculation about whether the
use of the word run corresponds with the abilities of particular actors in the company of the Chamberlain’s
Men.
104

his desires lies in his assertion that he will run after Helena. The implied stage directions
in his line indicate that he should awake and spring to his running feet, mimicking the
action that indicated Helena’s desire for Demetrius in the previous act.
Running even functions as the pseudo-magical means for avoiding physical
violence between Demetrius and Lysander in act four. When the “sport” that results from
Puck’s misapplication of the love juice escalates into threats of physical fighting, Oberon
does not immediately use his fairy magic to institute concord. Surely Puck and Oberon
have the magical powers necessary for creating instantaneous harmony between the rival
lovers. If Puck can transform Bottom’s head into an ass’s and Oberon’s flowers easily
create and eliminate love, then the two of them ought to be able to use magic to spark an
immediate end to the impending fight. But the only solution Oberon and Puck can
concoct for preventing a bloody fight is to run the lovers to the point of exhaustion.
Oberon instructs Puck: “Thou seest these lovers seek a place to fight /. . . lead these testy
rivals so astray/ As one come not within another’s way” (3.2.354, 358-9). Puck fools the
lovers by “railing” like them and inciting them to chase him through the forest. In place
of sword fights and death, the lovers run.
As the on-stage manifestation of the young Athenians’ sexual energies, running
signifies a value in itself. It figures more prominently in the play than the teleological
goal of their off-stage marriages.
138
Helena’s exclamation, “O, I am out of breath in this
fond chase” (2.2.88) hints that the running of the actors playing the young lovers ought to

138
The play’s investment in the deferral of marriage corresponds with the bleak stories it presents of the
consequences of sexual intercourse. Titania’s votress dies in childbirth and the risks of the “marriage bed”
prompt Oberon’s blessing in order to ward off infidelity and birth defects.
105

be as intense and “breathtaking” as the sexual activities it stands in for.
139
Shakespeare’s
audience participated in the phenomenological experience of the rising heat from the
young Athenians’ repeated physical exertions that must have mimicked the “extreme heat
of gratification” that Thomas Lacquer cites in early modern descriptions of sexual
orgasm.
140
By increasing the heat of the actors’ bodies as well as the heat of the playing
space, the running bodies invoke the sexual experiences that the play defers.
The breathlessness and increased heart rates associated with running also
foreground the fact that the bodily exertion is more important to young lovers than the
abstract concepts of the legal and social customs of marriage. Oberon’s solution for all of
the problems of the young lovers is to provoke them to run regardless of their
destinations. Once their chase ends, the female Athenians are silent, and the males play
roles that bear little weight on the narrative conclusions. It is as if the play considers
them no further than the terms of the Ovidian chase of Apollo and Daphne. In fact,
throughout the play, the actions of the lovers hardly vary as they become completely
defined according to the quick pace of their feet across the stage, recalling the energy of
Apollo and Daphne’s chase. I begin with these multiple examples of how the play defers
heterosexual coupling and marriage with the lovers running on the stage in order to make
them visible to my reader. It is my sense that many audiences and readers take for
granted that most of the lovers’ time on-stage is spent in the chase.

139
Helena’s exclamation is also representative of the lovers’ tendency to conjoin their verbal courtship with
their physical chase; Helena is out of breath because she has been chasing Demetrius with both her feet and
her voice. Throughout the play, the young lovers express their romantic relationships primarily through the
running of their bodies.
140
Thomas Lacquer, Making Sex (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 47.
106

Female to Male, Male to Female: Eliding Differences in the Chase

The phenomenon of Helena, played by a male actor, exerting herself in heated
chases across the early modern English stage recalls the popular sixteenth-century story
of Marie Germain.
141
The story of the girl who was chasing her swine when she felt male
genitalia burst forth from within her body is first recorded in print by the French
Ambroise Pare in his 1573 Deux livres de chirurgie. Michel de Montaigne cites Pare and
rearticulates the story twice, once in the Journal de Voyage and again in Book XX of his
Essays.
142
John Florio’s 1603 English translation of Montaigne’s Essays reads as follows:
My selfe traveling on a time by Vitry in France, hapned to see a man, whom the
Bishop of Soissons has in confirmation, named Germane, and all the inhabitants
thereabout have both knowne and seene to be a woman-childe, untill she was two
and twentie yeares of age, called by the name of Marie. He was, when I saw him,
of good yeares, and had a long beard, and was yet unmarried. He saith, that upon
a time, leaping, and straining himselfe to overleape another, he wot not how, but
where before he was a woman, he suddenly felt the instrument of a man to come
out of him: and to this day the maidens of that towne and countrie have a song in
use, by which they warne one another, when they are leaping, not to straine
themselves overmuch, or open thir legs too wide, for feare they should bee turned
to boies, as Marie Germane was. It is no great wonder, that such accidents doe
often happen, for if imagination have power in such things, it is so continually
annexed, and so forcibly fastened to this subject, that lest she should so often fall
into the relaps of the same thought, and sharpnesse of desire, it is better one time
for all to incorporate this virile part unto wenches.
143

The repetition of this story in multiple late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century
medico-philosophical texts confirms that early modern thinkers frequently resorted to

141
The story seems to be as popular with New Historicists from the 1990’s as it was in French medico-
philosophical texts from the late 1500’s. For varying examinations of the significance of the story for early
modern ideas about gender, see Stephen Greenblatt, Thomas Lacquer, and Will Fisher. Patricia Parker
offers the most comprehensive and astute analysis of the many vectors of the story.
142
For history of the story’s publication, see Patricia Parker, “Gender Ideology, Gender Change, The Case
of Marie Germain.” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Winter, 1993):.337-364.
143
http://www.uoregon.edu/~rbear/montaigne/1xx.htm
107

stories about running and chasing in their construction of the standard of active males and
passive females.
144

While Stephen Greenblatt and Thomas Lacquer cite the story of Marie Germain
as proof of the early modern tendency to conceptualize maleness as the perfect sex,
Patricia Parker argues convincingly that any efforts to fix ideas about perfect, active
males and imperfect, passive females are undermined by the larger contexts of the story
in both Pare and Montaigne’s texts. Parker opens up the interpretive field to account for
the ways that both Pare and Montaigne reveal intense anxieties about the slipperiness of
the gendered categories suggested by the story of the female becoming a male through
excessive exertion. Pare places the story of Marie Germain immediately after stories of
the Amazons whose active pursuit of males challenges the naturalness of passive females.
And Montaigne follows the story with lengthy explanations of how men, naturally in
possession of the anatomical parts that Marie gained, often fail to get their “soft” male
parts to perform. Parker argues that the focus on male impotency immediately after the
story of Marie Germain’s mid-run-sex-change contradicts any stable notions about the
perfection or active superiority of the male sex. Parker’s analysis of the inconsistencies
in constructions of gendered categories in early modern Europe provides a lens for
considering how efforts to relegate the supposedly superior qualities of action and pursuit

144
The French author who first records the story of Marie Germain, Ambrose Pare also includes the
following explanation of the proper passivity of women via chasing metaphors: “Let them always flee
before us, I mean even those who intend to let themselves be caught; they conquer us better in flight, like
the Scythians. Indeed, according to the law that Nature gives them, it is not properly for them to will and
desire; their role is to suffer, obey, consent [leur rolle est souffrir, obeir, consentir]. That is why Nature has
given them a perpetual capacity, to us a rare and uncertain one. They have their hour always, so that they
may be ready for ours: born to be passive.” qutd in Parker, “Gender Ideology,” 354.
108

to the male sex sometimes result more in the destabilization of traditional categories of
gender.
The running and chasing in A Midsummer Night’s Dream threatens to yield the
same results as the story of Marie Germain. Shakespeare’s play follows the same “one
sex model” where the differences between males and females are a matter of degrees
instead of opposite kinds.
145
All of the male and female Athenian lovers run through the
forest, minimizing the physical differences between their bodies. As a female who easily
plays the “male” role of the chaser in hot pursuit, Helena bears an uncanny resemblance
to the “woman-child” who inspired the song that warns that girls who run with a lengthy
stride will be turned into boys. In light of early modern notions of the Galenic one-sex
model, Helena’s lengthy stride (with her “legs that are longer to run away”) bears the
plausible risk of turning her into a boy. Performances of Shakespeare’s play remind us
that Helena continues to spread her legs at a speedy pace even when she is repositioned as
a “properly” fleeing female who is sought by the “properly” aggressive male. Helena’s
supposedly feminine, fleeing body is just as troublesome to gendered distinctions as her
supposedly masculine, chasing body; and the play never erases the threat of female
bodies becoming male and male becoming female. As long as Helena runs on-stage in

145
The story also speaks to the problems experienced by male actors attempting to embody the role of
Helena in hot pursuit of Demetrius. Lifting up his skirt and running at full speed, the actor playing Helena
might have been uniquely at risk of exposing his maleness. The story of Marie becoming Germain when
her/his male genitals pop out translates easily into the potential “bursting forth” of the signs of maleness
from beneath the skirts of dramatic female characters. In fact, it takes the risks of exposing the female
actors as boys to a literal level. The story literally lifts of the skirts of the female character for readers to
“see” her parts. By providing the image of a female who produces male parts when she runs, the story of
Marie Germain lays the groundwork for the imagination of the early modern audience who must have felt
the uneasiness of the risky activity of female running on the stage.
109

an abnormal patterns of pursuit, the play undermines efforts to stabilize assumptions
about perfect male activity and imperfect female passivity.
Like the “woman-child,” the chasing Athenians are on the threshold between the
roles of children and adults. They are liminars who, according to Victor Turner, are
“initiands or novices in passage from one sociocultural state and status to another.”
Between the roles of children and adults, the chasing lovers participate in a rite of
passage “betwixt and between” two social identities. They are “‘neither here nor there’:
they are betwixt and between positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention,
and ceremonial.”
146
Just like Marie Germain who was in between the roles of woman
and child when she chased the swine, the female Athenians in the forest are neither maids
nor wives, and the males are neither bachelors nor husbands. As they move from maids
and bachelors to wives and husbands, the liminality of their running troubles the
standards of gendered behavior that will be expected of them when they complete their
passage into marriage. In liminal motion, the chasers and the chased in Shakespeare’s
play defy the simplistic binaries suggested by the roles of the aggressive, male pursuer
and the passive, female victim.
Directors, critics, and audiences have frequently examined the way that the young
Athenians enter into a liminal “rite of passage” in the forest, which clearly represents a
liminal space. Geographically “betwixt and between” Athens and Lysander’s aunt’s
house, the forest through which the lovers run is, according to Lysander, beyond the
reach of “the sharp Athenian law” (1.1.162).
147
As a liminal space, the forest is not

146
Turner, The Ritual Process, 95.
147
The forest might also work as a liminal space where the fairy and mortal worlds meet.
110

completely severed from Athens; instead, it bears traces of both Athens and the lawless
space beyond. Quince describes the liminality of the forest best when he explains that the
mechanicals will meet “in the palace wood, a mile without the town . . . for if we meet in
the city we shall be dogged with company” (1.2.78-79). A mile away, the wood is
outside the city limits but close enough to retain the oxymoronic moniker “the palace
wood.” It is also home to the “Duke’s oak,” a natural object tied, at least in name, to civic
order.
148
At the margins, the fictional forest is close enough to Athens to offer criticism
of its gendered standards of behavior.
The chase scenes in the forest also occupy a liminal position in the play’s
narrative progression from Athens, to the forest, back to Athens. Poised between the
initial and final scenes in Athens, the wooded scenes stand out in relief against the others;
the magic of these scenes is heightened by their narrative position in between the scenes
of civic order.
149
In narrative and geographical terms, the woods is a space that is almost
over-determined by its liminality: it is a space between the beginning and end of the play,
Athens and Lysander’s aunt’s house, laws and desires, waking and sleeping, reality and
fantasy, mortals and fairies.
150
The play revels in the transitions between dual states,
taking place “on the borders of consciousness, being, and civilization.”
151
With its

148
Frances Dolan observes the connectedness between forests and the cities in Shakespeare’s plays when
she notes that “this pastoral place [the woods in As You Like It] is not an alternative to civilization, ‘nature
as opposed to culture.’” Frances E. Dolan, ed. “Introduction,” As You Like It (New York: Penguin, 2000),
xxxii.
149
Falk observes that “the three-part structure of A Midsummer Night’s Dream . . . closely parallels the
landscape of ‘rites of passage,’ which precipitates fundamental patterns of growth and renewal.” Florence
Falk, ”Dream and Ritual Process in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Comparative Drama 14 (1980), p.264.
150
Carter notes another liminal aspect of the forest when she observes that “the challenges to perception in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream are attributed by the enchanted parties to a dream, a liminal state between
reality and fantasy.” par. 27.
151
Carter, 21.
111

overabundance of liminal qualities, the forest is at the heart of the plays’ negotiations of
social norms and customs.
Many scholars interested in the youths’ liminality focus, surprisingly, on the
teleological goal of achieving the supposedly happy marriages. They interpret the lovers’
activities in the forest as a form of “education,” noting that it is through the magical,
anti-social, chaotic, dream-like experience in the forest that the young Athenians are
primed for the heterosexual pairings at the end of the play. William C. Carroll argues
that the “comic detoxification” of sexuality, violence, and death readies the young lovers
for marriage. For the Christian critic R. Chris Hassel, the experience in the forest teaches
“a new humility, a healthy sense of folly which urges that there are things that are true
that can neither be seen nor understood.”
152
In her application of Victor Turner’s terms
for liminality, Florence Falk concludes that the young Athenians must experience a
purgative transformation in the communitas of the forest that corrects their earlier narrow
perception of reality.
153
She argues, “to end the state of crisis, Oberon, together with his
assistant, Puck, impels the dream inhabitants to pass through certain ordeals that will

152
qutd in Dorothea Kehler, “Introduction, ”A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Critical Essays, Dorothea
Kehler, ed. (New York: Routledge, 2001), 34.
153
Using Turner’s terms for the cognitive stages in rites of passage to the young lovers, Falk explains that
they move from the structure of Athens, to the communitas of the forest, and then finally to the societas of
an Athens that has been “renewed and leavened by communitas . . . Structure refers to the relatively
abstract and permanent pattern of a social order whose form is grounded in law and custom; communitas, to
the spontaneous, temporary, and detached aggregate of persons (and environment) beset by provocative
acultural and anti-structural conditions. Persons in communitas are said to be liminal personae (“threshold
people”) because they exist in an ambiguous and transitional state. They are, in effect, faceless, nameless,
“invisible” beings who can profit from a temporary (solar) eclipse. ‘Transformed’ by the rite of passage,
these persons return again to structure . . . The third realm in Turner’s cognitive mapping is societas, which
refers to structure that has been renewed and leavened by communitas.” Falk focuses primarily on the
forest as a dream state that embodies the qualities of Turner’s communitas: “spontaneous, temporary, and
detached aggregate of persons (and environment) beset by provocative acultural and anti-structural
conditions.” Falk, 264.
112

redirect their misspent creative energies.”
154
In these readings, the liminal forest acts
primarily as a corrective space since it is where the excessive desires are gratified or
corrected so that they do not bleed into the supposedly more important and ordered space
of Athens.
155

The play’s investment in the abnormal pattern of pursuit from Ovid’s tale of
Apollo and Daphne prompts a more serious consideration of how the chase functions in
its own right as a liminal and dominant trope in the play. Given that the play prioritizes
the deferral of marriage, I argue that the play does not use the liminal experiences in the
forest merely in order to regulate the libidinal and excessive desires of the Athenians; it is
more than a mere means to the teleological ends of happy heterosexual pairing. As an art
form depicting a liminal process, Shakespeare’s play is not confined by the necessity of
reinstituting harmonious order after the liminal experience of the young lovers. Instead,
in Shakespeare’s play the liminal experience of the chase pulls against the return to social
order at the end.
As the young Athenians chase each other repeatedly through the fictional forest
and across the stage, their bodies literalize the liminal metaphor of “traveling” from one
social role to another. The young Athenians, like the forest itself, are doubly liminal:
they are “betwixt and between” the social stages of children and adults, and they are
physically in the process of crossing the physical thresholds of the doors at the back of

154
Falk, 270.
155
Annabel Patterson, by contrast, critiques scholars’ use of Turner’s theories for A Midsummer Night’s
Dream since she argues that they are based on the “idealist model of ritual action” that proposes that “the
ultimate purpose of rituals is seen as social regeneration and reconciliation.” Patterson argues for
consideration of an alternative theory, inherited “from Marx’s view that folk misrule has historically
functioned to express economic antagonisms and occasionally to sharpen them into actual conflict.”
Annabel Patterson, “Bottom’s Up: Festive Theory in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” A Midsummer
Night’s Dream: Critical Essays, Dorothea Kehler, ed. (New York: Routledge, 2001), 169.
113

the stage and the boundaries of the fictional forest throughout the play. As they chase
each other, their bodies enact the physical process of moving from individual maids and
bachelors to wives and husbands who are “caught” in marriage. The young Athenians’
bodies are connected by participation in the shared activity of chasing at the same time
that the chase necessitates that they remain “uncaught” and separate individuals. Their
bodies are in a unique position betwixt and between individualism and coupledom,
literalizing the metaphor of traveling from the social state of children to the social state of
married couples. In addition, as liminars between the states of childhood and adulthood,
the young Athenians are also poised between the clear divisions of males and females.
The performance of their chasing bodies blurs the gender distinctions that are supposed to
distinguish their proper realms of behavior and activity.
As Victor Turner explains, “the essence of liminality is to be found in its release
from normal constraints,”
156
and it is the experience of the chase that frees Helena,
Demetrius, Hermia, and Lysander from the normal constraints of gender that are
associated with what it means to be a girl, boy, wife, or husband.
157
In the liminal forest,
the females burst forth from behind the trees in the roles of masculine pursuers and the
males move their feet quickly like feminine fleers. When Helena first appears on-stage in
the liminal forest chasing Demetrius, she is clearly aligned with the male pursuer Apollo.
Her lines—“Leave you your power to draw,/ And I shall have no power to follow
you”(2.1.197-8)— echo Apollo’s promise in Ovid’s story that he will slow down if

156
160.
157
Unlike Rosalind and Orlando, the young lovers in As You Like It who take up residence in the forest, the
young lovers in AMND are distinguished by their constant movement that functions as a liminal activity
that resists stasis.
114

Daphne slows her flight (“moderatius oro, curre fugamque inhibe, moderatius insequar
ipse” 509-510). On the other hand, Demetrius falls easily into the role of the fleeing
female. He begs Helena to stop chasing him and he announces to her that he will “run
from thee and hide me in the brakes” (2.1.227). His lines closely mimic Ludovico
Ariosto’s descriptions of Angelica, one of the most famous fleeing virgins in early
modern Italian literature who is modeled on Ovid’s Daphne. In Harrington’s 1591
English translation of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, he specifies that Angelica runs like a
fawn or goat that “seek[s] itself in thickest bracks to hide” (33).
158
By echoing Angelica,
Demetrius’s lines demonstrate that the males can take on female flight just as easily as
the females can turn into male pursuers in the liminal experience of the chase.
Helena, the chaser who is paradoxically female and active, also challenges
assumptions that Daphne’s biology indicates that her running is a sign of submission.
The play suggests that she might be as easily aligned with Apollo’s pursuit as with
Daphne’s sex in spite of her female clothing. In other Shakespearean comedies, the
women who perform masculine actions such as traveling through forests usually don
male clothing. In plays such as As You Like It and Cymbeline, the cross-dressing females,
Rosalind and Imogen, visually become men as they gain the freedom and agency that
coincides with their masculine attire.
159
This is especially significant on the stage where
costumes literally “make a man.” When the actors playing Rosalind and Imogen don

158
Demetrius’s warning that Helena will be exposed to the “mercy of wild beasts” (2.1.228) if he runs and
hides himself in the brakes also points to how the “chaser” might subject himself to the threats of nature
and other predators if he chooses to chase after a fleeing female. See Chapter Two’s argument regarding
Ariosto’s rendering of the fleeing virgin in his Orlando Furioso.
159
See Lisa Jardine’s chapter “Twins and Travesties” in Reading Shakespeare Historically and Jean
Howard’s chapter “”Power and Eros” in The Stage and Social Struggle for thorough consideration of the
historical contexts and gendered implications of cross-dressing in Twelfth Night.
115

male “costumes,” little separates them in terms of gender from the actors playing the
male characters of Orlando or Posthumous. Thus, the cross-dressing females practically
become male characters and the transgressiveness of their actions is mitigated by their
male clothing. Pisanio tells Imogen that when she disguises herself as a man she “must
forget to be a woman” (3.4.156).
By contrast, when Helena enters the forest as a pursuer without donning male
clothing, the actions of her female body correspond with her feminine appearance. Her
physical pursuit thereby confuses the values assigned to masculine and feminine roles
instead of merely reinforcing the notion that characters who take action require masculine
appearances. In comparison to the male disguises of other Shakespearean heroines,
Helena’s feminine clothing suggests that in A Midsummer Night’s Dream rape is
thwarted by the actions of the female characters instead of their disguises. As Helena
engages in the supposedly masculine activity of holding chase while in feminine clothing,
she also prevents the audience from attributing her agency to a “put-on” masculinity. She
is not simply a female character playing a masculine role; she is a female character
redefining the role of the agent as feminine. Carole Levin relates Shakespeare’s
representation of the strength of powerful females, such as Olivia and Beatrice in Twelfth
Night and Much Ado About Nothing, to Queen Elizabeth’s self-representation. She points
out that “it is the non-cross-dressed heroines who expand gender definitions—who as
women act in powerful ways that might, like the actions of the queen, be called
‘male.’”
160
I argue that Helena plays a role similar to Olivia and Beatrice’s in her ability
to trouble gender while dressed as a woman. The confusion of the chase in

160
Levin, 127.
116

Shakespeare’s play, therefore, does more than simply switch the sex of the roles of the
“chaser” and the “chased.” As Victor Turner explains, “it is as though [liminars] are
being reduced or ground down to a uniform condition . . . Secular distinctions of rank
and status disappear or are homogenized,”
161
In the liminal chase, the distinctions of
gendered behavior are ground down so that the roles of the “chaser” and the “chased” do
not belong exclusively to males or females.
The alignment between Helena and Apollo and Demetrius and Daphne underlines
the instability of the opposed categories of sex difference in Ovid’s ancient tale. The
gender reversal might aim to reinforce the boundaries of opposing gender norms since it
presents the “chased” male as absurd and the “chasing” female as needing reform. But,
by comparing Helena with Apollo and Demetrius with Daphne, A Midsummer Night’s
Dream also offers a rereading of Ovid’s tale that questions the inherent masculinity of
pursuit and femininity of flight. The allusion might ask audiences to consider Helena’s
masculine chase as inherently flawed by her sex, but it also asks them to reread the flaws
of Apollo’s supposedly masculine pursuit via the retrospective lens of Helena’s chase.
The repetition of Apollo’s lines in Helena’s mouth asks audiences to focus on the
ineptitude of Apollo’s pursuit. When Helena speaks the lines cited above that link her
clearly to Apollo—“Leave you your power to draw,/ And I shall have no power to follow
you”(2.1.197-8)—her dependence on Demetrius while she plays the role of Apollo brings
Apollo’s own impotence into focus. When Demetrius commands Helena to “follow me
no more” (2.1.194), and Helena responds with: “You draw me” (2.1.195), her lines
suggest that the one who is “chased” (either Demetrius or Daphne) is the one who

161
The Ritual Process, 95.
117

compels—or “draws”—action. Attributing the force of agency to Demetrius, Helena’s
line troubles clear-cut gender binaries since it aligns Daphne’s feminine position of being
“chased” with the usually masculine quality of agency and Apollo’s masculine position
of the “chaser” with the usually feminine quality of passive dependence.
162
Helena’s
ventriloquism separates the position of the masculine chaser from the supposedly
masculine qualities of agency and power. In Helena’s mouth, Apollo’s sentiments
become signs of dependency that accentuate the embodied power of Daphne’s active
flight in Ovid’s tale.
As a result, when Oberon’s love juice repositions Helena, she gains the puissance
of the role that was formerly occupied by Demetrius. The standards of the liminal chase
that are established with the initial allusions to Apollo and Daphne prevent the play from
settling into standard categories of gendered behavior when the chase continues. Given
that the liminality of the chase in A Midsummer Night’s Dream wards off genuine threats
of rape, Helena gains power at the same time that she becomes “chased.” She becomes
the most independent and active of all the lovers on stage. When their verbal sparring
slows all of the lovers down at the end of act three, it is Helena whose body reinitiates
their active running. She compels the others to follow her by announcing her departure
with “I will not trust you, I,/ Nor longer stay in your curst company” (3.2.339-40). With
her confident declaration that “my legs are longer . . . to run away” (3.2.342), Helena’s
departure reads as an independent action instead of as compelled response. She carves
the path for the others to follow and stands out clearly as the one in front.

162
Aristotle set the precedent for early modern thinkers to consider action as masculine in his de Anima.
118

It is also when Helena is in the position of the “properly” chased female that she
articulates the play’s most clear objection to the standards of masculine pursuit and
feminine flight. When she is “chased,” she predictably spurns the pursuit of her suitors,
but her unpredictable motivation is not proper maiden modesty or wifely chastity.
Instead, her resistance is a reaction against the artificiality of Lysander and Demetrius’s
chase. Unaware of the love juice, Helena nonetheless takes issue with what she perceives
as the feigned lines of the males’ adoration. Even though their speeches are compelled
by the magic love juice, they echo those of “true” lovers and the play exposes the
artificiality of the general category of “chasing men.” Demetrius awakes with the love
potion in his eyes, dissecting Helena’s body verbally with a Petrarchan blazon derived
from the lines of Ovid’s Apollo, the god of poetry. His description of her “eyne,” her
“lips, those kissing cherries,” and her white hand follow the standards of romantic praise
inherited from Ovid through Petrarch by early modern English poets.
163
Demetrius also
calls Helena, “goddess, nymph, perfect, divine” (3.2.137), echoing Apollo’s address to
his nymph, Daphne. Helena resists Lysander and Demetrius’s use of the Ovidian (and
Petrarchan) language by questioning the masculinity of their pursuit, telling them: “If you
were men, as men you are in show, / You would not use a gentle lady so—” (3.2.151-
152). Helena’s labeling of their pursuit as a “confederacy” and a “sport” offers another
means through which the play mocks the idea that the pursuit belongs properly and
exclusively to males. When the play stages the “normal” pattern of the male chasing the
female, it is exposed as absurd and artificial.

163
In Ovid, Apollo spies Daphne and “He gazes on her lips, where mere gazing does not satisfy. He praises
her wrists and hands and fingers, and her arms bare to the shoulder: whatever is hidden, he imagines more
beautiful.”
119

Staging the Chase

The confusion of the liminal chase and the blurring of boundaries between males
and females is best expressed by the staging practices in late sixteenth century London
theaters. The bareness of the early modern playing spaces and the limitations of only two
doors for entering the platform stage require the actors playing the Athenian lovers to
cross over the thresholds of those two doors repeatedly as they travel through the fictional
space of the forest. As Alan Dessen argues, the actors on the early modern stages
actually “carry” space with them.
164
In order for the play to create the illusion of a
change in fictional space, the actors must exit through the doors at the back of the
stage.
165
For example, in order for the fictional space of the play to change from Athens
to the forest, the rude mechanicals exit, taking Athens away with them; Puck and the
Fairy enter, bringing the forest with them onto the stage. The early modern theater
requires the exits and entrances of the actors’ bodies—as opposed to the changes in sets
and backdrops on a proscenium stage—in order to transform the theater space of the
stage that was Athens into the fictional space of the forest.
166

In order to indicate that the lovers chase each other through the wide forest, the
actors must enter and exit, again and again, through the back doors of the early modern

164
Alan Dessen, A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580-1642( Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999).
165
The importance of the players’ actions is noted by Michael Redgrave who states “the basic will of the
actor must be, quite simply, to act: not to think, not to feel, not to exhibitionise, not to make a personal
statement—though he may do one or all of these—but to act.” Qutd in Kirsten Hastrup, Action:
Anthropology in the Company of Shakespeare (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2004), 20.
166
According to Gary Jay Williams, the English brought the Italianate proscenium stage to England in
1605, about ten years after the first production of MND, for masques for James I.
120

stage. The illusion of vast fictional space on the early modern stage depends
paradoxically upon the circular travels of the actors bodies that are hemmed in by the
theater space of the stage.
167
This circularity is especially pronounced on the sixteenth-
century public stages that differ from proscenium stages that were not introduced to
England from Italy until the seventeenth century. On a proscenium stage, actors can
create the illusion of moving forward through the forest as they enter at various panels
along the side of the stage. Their movements may be diagonal or crisscrossed since they
can move unseen behind the curtains that frame the stage. They might even circle the
side curtains and return from the same side where they exited. Proscenium stages with
elaborate sets can also indicate progression through the forest by moving backdrops or
portable “trees” that pass by the actors in order to create the illusion of travel. In
contrast, early modern platform stages used in the 1590s by Shakespeare’s company had
only two doors at the back which forced the actors to trace circular paths that ran across
the stage and behind the tiring room wall.
168
Even if the actors run with zig zag motions
or around the posts that hold up the roof over the stage, they ultimately trace a circular
path as they enter through one door and return to the other to depart.
The tension between the illusion of endless fictional space and the repeated
circular path of the actors over the stage results in a blurring of the identities of the
“chasers” and the “chased.” When Demetrius enters first with “Helena following him” at

167
Williams explains that “the lines of the lovers in their forest chase give the impression that they are
going deeper into the forest, to different locales, distinct from Titania’s bank. In fact, of course, they would
have simply re-entered each time onto the unchanged stage,” 25.
168
Williams notes the repetition but not the circularity of the actors movements: “The lines of the lovers in
their forest chase give the impression that they are going deeper into the forest, to different locales, distinct
from Titania’s bank. In fact, of course, they would have simply re-entered each time onto the unchanged
stage, ” 25.
121

2.1.188, the ordering of their bodies identifies Demetrius as the chased and Helena as the
chaser. This continues when he leaves and she follows 56 lines later, provoking
Oberon’s declaration that “ere he do leave this grove/ Thou shalt fly him, and he shall
seek thy love” (2.1.245-6). Yet, when they enter again at 2.2.90, their bodies seem linked
in a perpetual circle in the theater space rather than in the forward motion in the fictional
space of the chase. Twenty-first century productions that adapt early modern staging on
open stages enhance the energetic frenzy of the chase by multiplying the actors’ exits and
entrances in between the dialogue. For example: after Oberon watches Demetrius leave
the stage with Helena following and announces that he will intervene to reorder their
chase, some productions have Demetrius and Helena continue their chase without any
additional lines. Demetrius enters again, followed by Helena, who chases after
Demetrius, who exits before Helena The multiple scenes of running enhance the
ambiguity of who is the chaser and who is the chased.
The chase on the early modern stage does not follow a linear path that looks like
this:
Figure 3: Linear Chase
——>
Chaser Chased
122

Instead, the pursuit on the early modern stage looks like this:
Figure 4: Staging the chase

When the lovers’ bodies become part of a repeated circle, they are no longer part of the
clear linear arrangement of the chaser following the chased.
The circular nature of the lovers’ paths confuses the relationship between the
pursuer and the pursued as much as the flower’s love juice. The love juice prompts
Lysander and Demetrius to chase after Helena, but the consequence of the love juice in
terms of staging is merely the repetition of the circular paths traced earlier when Helena
chased Demetrius. Before and after the love juice, the lovers’ bodies act as part of a
circle that makes determining who is the chased and who is the chaser almost impossible.
Consider the following paths of the actors’ bodies in 2.2. after Puck has squeezed the
love juice on Lysander’s sleeping eyes. Demetrius enters running, followed by Helena.
Demetrius runs away alone off stage while Helena “stays” according to Demetrius’s
command. Stalled in the midst of her chase, Helena finds Lysander and awakens him.
123

Lysander wakes up, exclaiming, “And run through fire I will for thy sweet sake”
(2.2.109), indicating that the power of the love juice compels him to want to chase after
Helena, his new beloved. If we take his lines as stage directions, then Lysander wakes up
running after Helena, who most likely turns away in response to run in the direction of
Demetrius’s exit. Thus, if Helena runs away from Lysander at the moment of his
bewitched awakening, then her running figures her as one who is both “chased” by
Lysander and the one who is the “chaser” after Demetrius. Thus, the circular nature of
the path of the chase on the early modern stage contributes to the confusion caused by the
love potion. The ease with which Oberon’s love juice ultimately results in Helena
running away from pursuers in act three depends upon the circularity of the chase on the
early modern stage.
The circularity of the chase on the early modern stage disrupts the gender
hierarchies of the “proper” chase. The early modern staging of the circular chase allows
the one who flees to have an independence from the one who pursues. The subjectivity
of the one who flees is not dependent upon the active chaser who supposedly compels the
chase. On the early modern stage where the characters “carry” space with them, the
“chased” must enter first, establishing a new location and determining the path that the
“chaser” must follow. Thus, it is the one who flees who has the power to determine the
path of flight that the one who pursues must follow. In addition, the circular chase forces
the “chaser” to follow the path established by the “chased,” demonstrating that the
“chased” has the most active and independent role. Staging that is attuned to the way that
Helena and Oberon trouble the stereotypical relationship between the chaser and the
124

chased might accentuate this ambiguity by having Helena and Demetrius mimic each
other’s running styles and spatial patterns. When Helena announces that “My legs are
longer, though, to run away” (3.2.343), she initiates the chase that leads all the lovers to
exit after her. Helena becomes the most powerful figure in this scene of competition over
her, and this power is reduced to her “longer” legs that put her in the superior position of
the “fleer” who runs away. While she speaks these lines directly to Hermia who has
hands that are “quicker for a fray” (3.2.342), Helena’s line about her long legs echoes
Demetrius’s “I’ll run from thee” (2.1.227), announcing flight as the emblem of her own
independence.
The embodied performance of the chase on stage minimizes the opposition
between genders. A chase is as much an act of imitation as an act of pursuit.
Accordingly, the actors playing the young lovers work to mimic each other’s actions as
they run across the stage. As the action of the chase, the actors become connected in
their rhythmic breathing and similar actions. Shakespeare curiously does not differentiate
the activities of the lovers in the forest. Helena, Hermia, Demetrius, and Lysander all
participate substantially in the action of the chase. Consequently, the chase unites their
bodies as they engage in an non-gender specific activity. As the lovers share the activity
of breathlessly moving their bodies at full speed across the stage, the ties between sex and
gendered behavior that divide the maids from the bachelors become unraveled.
125

Epilogue

The chase of the Athenian lovers across the stage of A Midsummer Night’s
Dream captures the guiding argument of As She Fled: that the figure of the fleeing
woman involves a complex negotiation with the independence of female desire that
thwarts attempts at “fixing” the female body in static signification. As we saw in the last
chapter, the idea of female flight and male pursuit does not translate into the norms of
passive female submission and active male aggression on the early modern public stages.
Even though poets and dramatists attempt to stabilize the meaning of the fleeing female
as a symbol of male creative prowess, she is a figure who insists on managing her own
moving subjectivity. My dissertation has examined the many ways that imagining the
perpetual flight of the fleeing woman in poetry is tied to explorations of female
subjectivity. Chapter One proposes that Ovid’s emphasis on Daphne’s autonomy invites
early modern writers to invest in the figure of the fleeing woman as a means of exploring
female subjectivity. Chapter Two discusses how the Sudeley entertainments, performed
in the physical presence of Queen Elizabeth, draw attention to how the fleeing woman
runs in pursuit of her own ambitions for a shared female experience of chastity as much
as she runs away from the god of poetry and his attempts to limit her body in verse. And
Chapter Three examines how Spenser stresses the active qualities of female chastity by
rejecting the associations between the laurels of poetry and his fleeing woman who runs
faster than any of her predecessors. In the process, Spenser refashions the poetic means
126

for figuring the fleeing female and celebrating the creative distance between her body and
her pursuers. Chapter Four offers an analysis of how A Midsummer Night’s Dream
stages an abnormal pattern of pursuit as it translates the chase of Ovidian poetry into the
embodied performance on the early modern stage.
This dissertation has focused primarily on sixteenth-century poems and dramas
written by men who negotiate and transform the boundaries of the relationship between
female flight and male pursuers. While they trouble the binaries of active male pursuit
and passive female flight, most sixteenth-century texts retain the gendered assumption of
the masculinity of poets. Even as the Sudeley Daphne usurps Ovid’s authority to revise
her own story when she runs toward Elizabeth, she does so in reaction against the
consistently male figures of poetry. Her bodily movement and Elizabeth’s physical
presence authorize the drastic revision, not female literary participation. While the
interest in the subjectivity of the fleeing female does not end with the sixteenth-century,
the writers of the seventeenth-century poetry envision new poetic means of freeing
female flight from the confines of the tree that, I argue, correspond with the increased
publication of poems penned by female writers. In concluding this dissertation, I want to
highlight two seventeenth-century poems whose celebration of the autonomy of the
fleeing woman coincides with a recognition of the prowess of female poetic authority.
The first comes surprisingly in Thomas Carew’s erotic revision of Daphne’s story in “A
Rapture,” and the second more predictably in a poem in praise of the writing of
Katherine Philips, written by an anonymous female poet, referred to within literary
history as Philo-Philippa.
127

In his elegy for John Donne, Carew voices unabashed disdain for the mythology
of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in early modern poetry. He laments that poets after Donne
will “repeal the goodly exiled train/ Of gods and goddesses, which in thy just reign/ Were
banished nobler poems; now, with these, /The silenced tales o’ th Metamorphoses / Shall
stuff their lines, and swell the windy page” (63-67). Accordingly, Carew employs the
figure of the fleeing woman in rebellion against the long history of “stuffing” poetry with
the stale stories of Ovid. Carew therefore aims to shock his reader out of the comfort of
old mythology by proclaiming that Daphne breaks her bark, but his revision merely
echoes the feminist performance of the Sudeley tale that resists the appropriation of the
fleeing woman for male “rapture.”
Daphne’s is one of four stories of exemplary female chastity that Carew upends in
the fifth stanza of Carew’s poem. Inviting his beloved Celia to enjoy mutual sexual
pleasures, Carew dilates the exceptional license to be found in their destination, the
Elysian fields. He asserts that “all things are lawful there that may delight / Nature or
unrestrained appetite” (112). The only “sin” is neglect of “Love’s rites.” As proof,
Carew details the images of how “the Roman Lucrece” moves “Her pliant body in the act
of love. /To quench the burning ravisher, she hurls / Her limbs into a thousand winding
curls”; Penelope exposes herself “before the youth of Ithaca”; Daphne runs toward
Apollo; and “Laura lies in Petrarch’s learned arms.”
Carew, however, betrays the insincerity of his investment in female sexual
enjoyment in these lines. He cannot import the figures of Lucrece, Penelope, Daphne,
and Laura without remembering their resistance against male sexual assaults. Even
128

though he sometimes uses the pronouns “we” and “our” to imply shared pleasures, the
sex he imagines for the chaste females involves their submission and objectification to
the very rapists and based suitors whom they clearly reject in classical and Renaissance
texts. His account of Lucrece pleasuring Tarquin enacts a literary rape by repeating
Tarquin’s failure to heed her refusal of consent. Indifferent to her own fiery desires for
her husband, Carew pictures Lucrece “stud[ying] artful postures” in order to “quench the
burning ravisher.” In other words, “all things” that “may delight/ Nature or unrestrained
appetite” are not lawful in Carew’s Elysian fields, specifically not the things that delight
chaste women.
169

It is only in his revision of the story of Daphne that Carew’s imagination comes
close to a convincing depiction of female desire. Since Daphne’s flight prevents her
objectification, Carew can only revise her story within terms that maintain her
subjectivity. In order to revise the Metamorphoses, Carew grants Daphne the active
agency of escaping the tree that is featured so prominently in Elizabethan poetry and in
other seventeenth-century revisions:
170

169
I agree with Paula Johnson’s observation that Carew does not really support unrestrained license in his
poem: “what [Carew] really means is that laws are turned around; one is under command to do exactly
what the world forbids.” “Carew’s ‘A Rapture’: The Dynamics of Fantasy,” Studied in English Literature,
1500-1900, Vol. 16, No.1, The English Renaissance (Winter, 1976):154.
170
The association between Daphne and the static laurel tree also persists as a standard for evaluating
poetic glory in poems such as Waller’s “The Story of Phoebus and Daphne Applied.” Waller reiterates that
the enigma of Daphne’s metamorphosis is the simultaneous loss of her beauty and gain of poetic glory:
“Yet what he sung in his immortal strain,/Though unsuccessful, was not sung in vain:/All but the nymph,
that should redress his wrong,/ Attend his passion, and approve his song./ Like Phoebus thus, acquiring
unsought praise, /He catched at love, and filled his arm with bays.” Other poems by Marvell and Cowley
invoke Daphne only out of an interest in nature. Andrew Marvell most famously asserts that “Apollo
hunted Daphne so,/ Only that she might laurel grow” (“The Garden” 29-30), erasing Daphne’s subjectivity
in its emphasis on the male poet’s relationship to the superior beauty of the natural tree. Marvell dismisses
the stories of arboreal transformations entirely in the exclamations that immediately preceed his allusions to
Daphne: “Fair trees! wheres’e’er your barks I wound,/ No names shall but your own be found,” 23-24.
129

Daphne hath broke her bark, and that swift foot,
Which th’angry gods had fastened with a root
To the fixed earth, doth now unfettered run
To meet th’ embraces of the youthful sun.
She hangs upon him like his Delphic lyre;
Her kisses blow the old, and breathe new fire;
Full of her god, she sings inspired lays,
Sweet odes of love, such as deserve the bays,
Which she herself was. (131-139)

No longer the emblematic laurel tree, Daphne occupies the position of the poet who earns
the bays. Gordon Braden considers “Carew’s resolution of Ovid's myth” as “mirroring
Petrarch's inversion of it.” He writes that
where Petrarch elides Daphne to become the laurel himself, Carew restores a
Daphne who undergoes Petrarch's experience and becomes herself a poet. You
learn things being a tree. She leaves paralysis not simply to service her lover, but
to confront him as a new equal, interested in mutual pleasure; sexual gratification,
at least at this level, comes in the engagement with an other of something like
one's own talents and instincts.
171

I would like to add that the precedent of the independent agency of Daphne’s Ovidian
flight in sixteenth-century poetry makes possible Daphne’s participation in the eroticism
of the Elysian fields without succumbing to the pornographic positions of Lucrece’s
“artful postures” or Penelope’s self exposure.
Carew takes the interest of sixteenth-century poets in the agency of the fleeing
woman one step further by identifying with her as a poetic agent. Carew’s Daphne runs
unfettered toward Apollo’s embraces as she follows the footsteps of the many fleeing
woman who run toward their own desires. There is, of course, something unnerving
about Daphne running toward her potential rapist, but Carew’s immediate recasting of
Daphne into the role of the poet who sings “inspired lays” opens up the possibility of

171
Gordon Braden, “Beyond Frustration: Petrarchan Laurels in the Seventeenth Century,” Studies in
English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 26, No. 1, The English Renaissance (Winter, 1986): 5-23.
130

Daphne determining the direction of the poem. Unlike Lucrece whom Carew envisions
reading Aretine and studying images carved on the “bark of every neighboring tree” and
Penelope whose body Carew proposes as a replacement for the text of “her endless web,”
Daphne becomes an active participant in literary production after she escapes her bark
with her swift foot. We can believe in Carew’s revision of Daphne’s story since it merely
returns her to her self-compelled flight rather than to an impossible position of sexual and
literary submission.
I turn, lastly, to a poem written by a woman that takes up the full feminist
implications of Daphne’s agency and ability to master her own desires in spite of her
metamorphosis into the laurels of poetry. In 1663, Katherine Philips’s translation of
Corneille’s La Mort de Pompee was the first drama written by a woman performed on a
British stage. Immediately following the performance, Philips received a poem from an
anonymous female admirer, named by literary historians as Philo-Philippa, who initiates
her feminist encomium with the figure of Daphne’s freely moving body.
172
Philo-
Philippa commences the poem described by Philips, “To the Excellent Orinda,” with a
complicated image of Daphne coming toward the laurel-worthy female poet:
Let the male Poets their male Phoebus chuse,
Thee I invoke, Orinda, for my Muse;
He could but force a Branch, Daphne her Tree

172
Philips herself described the anonymous poet in a letter to Sir Charles Cotterell as one, “who pretends to
be a Woman, [and] writes very well, but I cannot imagine who the Author is, nor by any Inquiry I can
make, have hitherto been able to discover.” In spite of Philip’s declared suspicion of the author’s gender, I
follow the lead of most literary historians who find the self-disclosed female gender of the poet credible.
James Biester writes, “Given the uncertainty over the gender of the authors of many key texts in the
antifeminism debate, however, entirely ruling out the possibiliy that the author was a man assuming a
female persona seems unwise. Since female authorship of the poem seems most probably, I will follow the
speaker’s lead by referring to “Philo-Philippa” as a woman, but caveat lector,” James Beister, “Gender and
Style in Seventeenth-Century Commendatory Verse,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900. 33.3
(Summer, 1993): 508.
131

Most freely offers to her Sex and thee,
And says to Verse, to unconstrain’d as yours,
Her Laurel freely comes, your fame secures:
And men no longer shall with ravished Bays
Crown their forc’d Poems by as forc’d a praise.

Philo-Philippa’s ability to rearrange the terms of Daphne’s story so that she can move
freely depends, like Carew’s revision, upon the context of the prowess of female poets.
Philo-Philippa announces that Philips’ poetic triumphs not only earn her own bays, they
also prevent future male poets from achieving “ravished Bays” by means of force.
Unlike Carew’s libertine revision, Philo-Philippa’s addresses and obliterates the erotic
appeal of the force of rape. Whereas the violence of rape linger beneath Carew’s
libertine verse, the erotic relationship between Daphne and the poet here is freely given
and seen as erasing the force of other poetry against woman. With her prediction, Philo-
Philippa suggests that earlier male poets claimed the laurels of poetic glory with force
because of the absence of a famed female poet. Her feminist agenda involves praise for
the accomplishments of a female poet, but it also includes the goal of freeing women
from the object position in stories that equate rape with poetic strength. The intersection
of the poetry of Philips results in the expansion of the boundaries of female poetry and
liberty.
The figure of Daphne that Philo-Philippa offers as the embodiment of praise for
female poetry, however, is odd: it is ambiguous and difficult to picture. Is Daphne in this
poem a woman? A tree? Or a concept? The poems and dramas that feature Daphne
running freely in her human form include a key moment of Daphne breaking forth out of
the tree. Carew’s poem, analyzed above, declares that “Daphne hath broker her bark,”
132

William Habington predicts that “Faire Daphne her faire selfe shall free/ From the chaste
prison of the tree,” and the Sudeley performance, examined at length in the second
chapter of this dissertation, stages the spectacle of Daphne riving forth out of an on-stage
tree. Yet, even though the poem bears notable resemblance to the drama of Daphne
running toward Elizabeth in order to offer her praise, Philo-Philippa offers no evidence
that Daphne must break out of the tree in order to regain volition and movement. On the
one hand, the poem suggests that Daphne approaches Philips within the form of the tree
in the lines “her Laurel comes, your fame secures” (6). On the other hand, however, the
lines, “Daphne her Tree / Most freely offers to her Sex and thee,” imply that Daphne and
the tree that she offers are separate entities. Like the woodcut images of Daphne caught
in the midst of her metamorphosis, the moving female in “To the Excellent Orinda” is
both a woman and the laurel.
173

The ambiguity of the image contributes to Philo-Philippa’s feminist project for it
assumes the agency and independent subjectivity as a given for its female figure,
regardless of whether she remains within or without the tree. In this commendatory
poem, there is no tension between the stillness of the laurel and the amazing speed of the
nymph; instead, the poem takes for granted that the tree can move and that the moving,
human Daphne has the power to signify and secure poetic fame. Throughout the poem,
the speaker promotes the self-sufficiency of the human female body. Poetry is not a
matter of the amorphous and gender-neutral mind; rather, it is the creative result of
embodied productivity. The superiority of Katherine Philips’s poetry becomes the

173
See Chapter Two for my analysis of the woodcut emblems depicting Daphne’s perpetual movement in
early modenr printed texts.
133

impetus for a reminder of the strength of Amazons, “train’d up to arms” and “Spartan
Virgins strong as Spartan Men” (63-64). In a reference to another of Ovid’s tales in the
Metamorphoses, Philo-Philippa exposes the competence of female bodies, even in the act
of sex, when she writes,
Ovid in vain Bodies with change did vex,
Changing her form of life, Iphis chang’d Sex.
Nature to Females freely doth impart
That, which the Males usurp, a stout, bold heart.
Thus Hunters female Beasts fear to assail;
And female Hawks more mettal’d than the male. (69-74)

The poem fully embraces the homoeroticism of the tale of Iphis and Ianthe at the same
time that belittles Ovid’s heteronormative resolution of changing Iphis into a man in
order to marry Ianthe.
174

The female form usurps the male in all arenas of erotics and poetics. In the
revision of the aetion of the laurels, Daphne literally usurps Apollo’s position as her
body, as a woman or a tree, becomes the sufficient possessor of the laurels. The poem
literalizes the suggestion in Ovid, Petrarch, and the poets who follow, that the laurels of
poetry belong most naturally to the female body. However, in Philo-Philippa the female
body is not one to be written upon, but instead one that engages in the active production
of writing. Philo-Philippa makes no claims that the female poet transcends her female
body by becoming the laurel tree or any other immortal shape. Instead, she insists that
the power of her poetry and her agency belongs naturally to the form of the female sex.
As the poets of the seventeenth-century respond to the long poetic history of the fleeing

174
See David Robinson for an examination of the significance of the lesbian implications of Philo-
Philippa’s inclusion of the story of Iphis and Ianthe. David Robinson, Closeted Writing and Lesbian and
Gay Literature: Classical, Early Modern, Eighteenth-Century (Burlington: Ashgate, 2006).

134

woman as well as to the emergence of female poets in print, the imaginative boundaries
of female flight expand for feminist movements.
135

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Abstract (if available)

Abstract The argument of this dissertation stimulates the intersections of early modern performance, gender studies, and poetics as it investigates sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature that appropriates the figure of the chaste, fleeing woman. I argue that despite the insistence of early modern texts that female movement indicates sexual incontinence and that chaste women ought to stay at home, many early modern fictions betray a fascination with the idea of women in motion and, most specifically, with the figure of Daphne, who famously flees from Apollo, the god of poetry. In these texts, the fleeing woman becomes a complicated source of poetic inspiration with both historical and literary roots.

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Creator Braden, Amy Margaret (author)

Core Title As she fled: women and movement in early modern English poetry and drama

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 01/20/2010

Defense Date 11/10/2010

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Carew,Daphne,Drama,Elizabeth I,female agency,Flight,Florimell,Helena,Katherine Philips,movement,OAI-PMH Harvest,Philo-Philippa,Poetry,Shakespeare,Spenser,Sudeley,Women

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor James, Heather (committee chair), Habinek, Thomas N . (committee member), Lemon, Rebecca (committee member), Smith, Bruce R. (committee member)

Creator Email abraden@usc.edu,abraden76@hotmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2803

Unique identifier UC1363318

Identifier etd-Braden-3425 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-289722 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2803 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Braden-3425.pdf

Dmrecord 289722

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Braden, Amy Margaret

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu