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The Orphic Physics of Early Modern Eloquence

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The Palgrave Handbook of Early Modern Literature and Science

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Abstract

Since its first appearance in the poetry of early Greece, the myth of Orpheus has helped to conceptualize the hidden process whereby eloquent language persuades or otherwise produces belief by making a strong impression on its audiences. The earliest tales of Orpheus emphasize the preternatural force of artful language, endowing Orpheus’s song with the power to move animals, trees, and stones.1 In Roman versions of the myth, including those contained in Virgil’s Georgics and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Orpheus descends into the underworld in order to win back his dead wife Eurydice. He uses his song to persuade the gods of Hades to release his bride, only to lose her a second time when he disobeys their command and gazes back as they depart the underworld. In his grief Orpheus renounces all women, promising to love only boys, and his mournful song draws trees, beasts, and stones to follow him. Yet despite the power of his song, Orpheus is torn apart by a howling band of Bacchae in revenge for his disdain. Dismemberment, however, does not quiet his voice, and Orpheus’s severed head and lyre continue to sing as they float down the Hebrus to the island of Lesbos, where Apollo protects the head from the bite of a snake and gives it the power of prophecy. Virgil and Ovid thus emphasize the magical force of artful language, but they also highlight the impotence of Orpheus’s song (he fails to rescue Eurydice and is eventually torn to pieces). In the Metamorphoses, Orpheus is killed, as Joseph Ortiz explains, because he cannot ‘move’ the Bacchantes (in illo tempore primum /inrita dicentem nec quicquam voce moventem) and so cannot deflect stones being thrown at him.2

Orpheus his tongue surmounted all other.… it delited, and allured: it moued, and rauished: it pearsed, and pleased…

—Francis Clement, The Petie Schole (1587)

Fables and Parables … [leaue] behind a deeper impression, then can be made by the liuelesse precepts of Philosophie.

—George Sandys, Ovids Metamorphosis (1632)

I am very grateful to Howard Marchitello, Evelyn Tribble, J.K. Barret, Elisha Cohn, Amanda Goldstein, Rayna Kalas, Karen Mann, and the faculty and graduate students in the Columbia Early Modern Colloquium for their assistance in shaping this essay. A series of joint panel presentations with Liza Blake and Wendy Hyman on ‘The Physics of Early Modern Poetics’ have been invaluable in inspiring the development of this research.

[Francis Clement, The Petie Schole with an English Orthographie (London, 1587), 45; George Sandys, ‘To the Reader’ in Ouids Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologiz’d, and Represend in Figures, trans. G. S. (Oxford [and London]: Iohn Lichfield [and William Stansby], 1632)]

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of English, Cornell University, New York, NY, USA

    Jenny C. Mann

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  1. Department of English, Rutgers University–Camden, Camden, NJ, USA

    Howard Marchitello

  2. Department of English, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

    Evelyn Tribble

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Mann, J.C. (2017). The Orphic Physics of Early Modern Eloquence. In: Marchitello, H., Tribble, E. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Early Modern Literature and Science . Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46361-6_11

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