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THE TEXTS OF FIELDING'S OVID
HUGHAMORY
Ovid's Art o[ Love Paraphrased, and Adapted to the Present Time, a reworking
in prose of the first book of the A rs Amatoria, was published on 25
February 1747 (General Advertiser); the publisher, Andrew Millar, the
printer, probably Henry Woodfall,' and the translator, Henry Fielding,
were all anonymous. In the imprint appeared the names of Mary Cooper, a
'trade publisher' who distributed copies for Millar to the town and country
booksellers, Ann Dodd, a 'mercury' who supplied the London hawkers, and
George Woodfall, pamphlet-vender and son of the printer.' A Dublin
reprint of 1756, reissued with cancel title-pages as The Lover's Assistant in
Dublin, 1759 and London, 1760, gave the first printed attribution of the
work to Fielding, but Millar had openly advertised it as Fielding's from 1754
to 1758, and his authorship must have been generally known in the trade.'
The first edition was still 'in print' in 1766, when a London trade catalogue
lists him as the author,' and the attribution is repeated in Watt's Bibliotheca
Britannica (1824) and Lowndes's Bibliographer's Manual (1834, etc.), to say
nothing of L.W. Briiggemann's superb View o[ the English Editions,
Translations, and Illustrations o[ the Ancient Greek and Latin Authors (Stettin,
1797), echoed in nineteenth-century authorities like F.L.A. Schweiger's
Handbuch der classischen Bibliographie (Leipzig, 1834).
1. His ornaments, or possibly those of his son Henry (d.1769), appear
throughout; cf. Richard J. Goulden, The Ornament Stock of Henry Woodfall, 17191747 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1988), nos. 155, 189 (shared with Henry
jun.), 272, 274, 306 and 317. The latest imprint recorded by Goulden is 1746, Henry
sen. d. ca. 27 May 1747, and one ornament is not in Goulden.
2. Michael Treadwell, 'London Trade Publishers, 1675-1750', Library, 6th ser.,
4(1982): 99-134. The 'real imprint' was acknowledged in a later advertisement,
'Printed for A. Millar ... and sold by M. Cooper ... A. Dodd ... and G. Woodfall'
!jacobite's Journal, 12 March 1748). Cooper also owned or shared copyrights
(Beverly Schneller, 'Mary Cooper, Eighteenth Century London Bookseller, 1743 to
1761', Ph.D. diss., Catholic University of America, 1987); Millar's advertisment,
however, makes it clear that in this case, as in other Millar properties with her
imprint around this time, she was acting as his distributor.
3. W.B. Coley. Review of The Lover's Assistant, ed. C.E. Jones (1961),
Philological Quarterly, 41 (1962): 587-88.
4. A Catalogue ofAll the English Books that have been published these sixty years past
(London, 1766); a 'remainder' may still have existed in the twentieth century, since
the Harvard, Yale, and Princeton copies, all bound after 1900, display stabbing.
BSANZ Bulletin, v.23 no.1, 1999, 11-26
12
Bibliographical Society ofAustralia and New Zealand
Despite this bibliographical chorus, Fielding's authorship was generally
ignored by his biographers and students of English literature before W.L.
Cross, who was unable to locate a copy of the first edition.' Harold Child,
in the Cambridge History of English Literature, v.10 (1921), noted only the
1759 reissue of Tbe Lover's Assistant, and it fell to Leonard Rice-Oxley
(former owner of a copy) to record the first edition for literary history in
the Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (1941). Douglas Cleverdon
(another owner) prepared a radio version for the Fielding Bicentenary,
performed on the BBC Third Programme, 12 October 1954, by Hugh
Burden and Aline Waites.' Some seven copies of the first edition are to be
found today in public collections,' but it remains the least studied of
Fielding's works. Claude E. Jones based his 1961 edition of Fielding's
English text on the Dublin reprint, even though at least four copies of the
first edition were then readily accessible. The two extended examinations of
Fielding's knowledge of the classics to date focus on his novels,' and his
paraphrase of Ovid receives only passing mention by his recent biographers.
To my knowledge, this is the first article ever devoted to it.
Composition allegedly goes back in places to Fielding's youth ('many
Years ago' - Preface), but the historical references have been systematically
modernized, if so. 'What inclined the Author to publish it now,' he
continues, 'was that Passage so justly applicable to the Glorious Duke of
CUMBERLAND, which cannot fail of pleasing every good Briton' (font
reversed). Ovid's lines praising Augustus's grandson Gaius Julius Caesar (20
BC-4 AD) and his forthcoming campaign against the Parthians (AA, 1.1635. Wilbur L. Cross, The History of Henry Fielding, 3v. (New Haven: Yale
University, 1918), 3: 313.
.
6. Radio Times, 8 October 1954, pp.9 and 25; I owe this reference to Sheridan
Baker.
7. With dates of deposit or acquisition, these are: Lincoln's Inn (1785); Harvard
(1918); John Rylands (1929); Yale (1949), Trinity College, Cambridge (1952);
Pnncewn (1971); and the British Library (1992). The twentieth-century sales record
opens at Hodgson's [Leonard Rice-Oxley], 16 December 1926, no.522 - ? Ximenes,
Occasional list 92 [1991], no.98 (now BL). A second copy was offered by Quaritch,
Cat. 408 (April 1927), no.627 _ Elkin Mathews, Cat. 23 (February 1929), no.23
(now Yale); a third, at Sotheby's [Douglas Cleverdon?], 26 April 1937, no.533 (now
TCe); and a fourth at Sotheby's (Sir R. Leicester Harmsworth), 27 March 1939,
no.387 (now Princeton?). The Rylands copy formerly belonged to a Manchester
subscription library, the Portico Library (f.1806), as D.W. Riley kindly informs me.
. 8. Bernard Shea, 'Classical Learning in the Novels of Henry Fielding', PhD.
dlSs., Harvard University, 1952; Nancy A. Mace, Henry Fielding's Novels and the
ClaSSIcal Tradition (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996), which, however,
mcludes a brief section on Fielding's translations (pp.43-5).
The Texts ofFielding's Ovid
13
228) are applied to the youngest son of George II Augustus, whose victory
at Culloden seemed to augur vengeance for the bloody English defeat at
Fontenoy. In the Jacobite's Journal, no.15 (12 March 1748), Fielding
recommended it as 'a new Translation' for 'the unlearned Reader, where he
will find all the Precepts of the Original modernized, and rendered agreeable
to the present Times' and promised 'the Translation of the second Book'
with suitable encouragement. By that date Cumberland's defeat at Lauffeld
had recapitulated Gaius's disastrous campaign in Parthia, which could
hardly, if Fielding had thought about it, have rendered the poem 'agreeable
to the present Times' - especially since Gaius died only eighteen months
after the siege.
Fielding's version of Ovid recalls some other projects, such as his prose
translation of Aristophanes, launched with the Plutus (1742), his neverrealized translation of Lucian, announced in the Covent-Garden Journal,
no.52 (30 June 1752), or the metrical burlesque of Juvenal (annotated in
Latin) and other early writings collected in his Miscellanies (1743). One
might tentatively assign the 'paraphrased' parts of his Ovid to an earlier
stage of composition, and the 'adaptation' to a later stage, but none of the
many English equivalents of classical realia or datable references and
allusions anywhere in his version can be certainly assigned to Fielding's
youth, or much before 1739.' Like his Aristophanes, moreover, but unlike
his Juvenal, Fielding's Ovid was written for 'the unlearned Reader': its notes
are entirely in English, and 'where we have been obliged to deviate, we have
given the literal Translation'; Fielding declares (preface, font reversed),
though compared to the Juvenal such 'deviations' were relatively limited in
number and scope lO A date of composition around 1745, then, makes good
sense; like the poems in the Miscellanies, the Ovid was thoroughly updated,l1
and exactly what belongs to the earlier period can no longer be specified.
The anonymity that Fielding preserved is characteristic of his journalism at
this time, a signal that his celebration of Cumberland belongs in the public
sphere (as opposed to the private history of his novels, or interpretations of
the classics like his Plutus).
9. One possibly early parallel is to an untitled poem written ca.I729; cf. Miller's
note, in Miscellanies 0/ Henry Fielding, Esq; ed: H.K. Miller, Bertrand A. Goldgar
and H. Amory. 3v. (Middletown, Ct.: Wesleyan University Press, 1972-1997), 1:79,
n.2; but both passages may derive independently from Prior.
10. Mace, Fielding's Novels, pp.43-4, misleadingly implies that all of Fielding's
'modernizations' are alike in this regard.
. 11. Hugh Amory, 'The Evidence of Things Not Seen: Concealed Proofs of
Fleldmg's Juvenal', Papers a/the Bibliographical Society 0/ America, 80(1986): 15-53;
and see Miller's notes in Misc. 1, pp.35 n.l, 56 n.2 and [85] n.1.
14
Bibliographical Society ofA ustralia and New Zealand
Though of little value for the history of composition, the distinction
between a paraphrase and an adaptation may usefully distinguish two very
different degrees of licence or nonconformity in Fielding's version from the
fluency that accompanies any good translation. In fact, about three-quarters
of his Ovid might better be described as a free translation - certainly no
looser than, say, Dryden's well-known version, published in 1709, which
expands its text by about a seventh. 12 Hence one can usually establish the
text that Fielding is translating with some accuracy. At the end of his
Preface, Fielding appealed to the opinion of 'One of the most learned Men
of this Age' - possibly James Harris - who 'thought it wouLd serve better to
expLain the meaning of Ovid to a Learner, than any other TransLation, or all his
numerous Commentators' (font reversed).
Ovid's transitions struck Fielding as too rapid for prose: 'Here [AA 1.595
n.a (3rd sequence)] and in many other Places,' he observes, 'we have been
obliged to supply that Connection which is greatly wanting in the Original.'
Typically, a brief topic sentence suffices, as in this case ('I proceed to other
Lessons'), but his supplements take many other forms as well. At one point
(AA 1.585-8), Ovid shifts so abruptly from advising deceit to condemning it,
that his modern editors, E.]. Kenney and A.S. Hollis, propose that the
passage might be moved to a more logical location, following line 742. 13
Fielding instead softened the contradiction: 'It is a safe and common way to
deceive under Pretence of Friendship; 1 must own, however safe and
common it is, it is not aLtogether blameLess' (= Ovid, crimen habet); and he
goes· on to suggest that this 'Dishonesty' is almost inevitable in any intimate
relationship. Again, where Ovid changes subject by a simple adverb
('Blanditiis animum furtim deprendere nunc sit', AA 1.619),1' Fielding
prefers a more elaborate transition, 'But to return to my schoLars. Flatter with
all your might'.
Yet other glosses bowdlerize the text, ensuring that it stays relevant to a
Christian society, though editorial distaste for indecency or inappropriate=
12. Usually catalogued under Ovid as author, but AD. Melville can fairly
characterize it as 'a vigorous and pleasing paraphrase' - Ovid, The Love Poems
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p.xxxii. The distinction itself is loose, as
the precision of any translation varies from phrase to phrase.
13. EJ Kenney. 'Notes to Ovid IT', Classical Quarterly, n.s. 9(1959): 240-60; Ars
Amatoria, Book I, ed. A.S. Hollis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977).
14. 'Now mine her heart with flattery's subtle charge' (tr. B.P. Moore [1935),
reprinted in Melville, Love Poems). Quotations from Woodfall's Latin are in
reversed fom, unless they are displayed; emphasis has been added to both the Latin
and English, to bring out parallels.
The Texts ofFielding's Ovid
15
ness ("n(lETI",") sanctioned emendations long before Christ." The levity with
which Ovid - or his spokesperson, Jupiter - treats a lover's oath (AA 1.63336) could not be lightly passed over. In the text, Fielding cautions his reader
that 'The Antients vented horrid Impieties on this Occasion', before
qualifying jupiter's example with the comment, 'though a Christian must
not talk in this manner, yet I believe it may be one of those Sins which the
Church of Rome holds to be venial, or rather venal', and he adds in a
footnote that 'This is the most exceptionable Passage in the whole Work'.
Ovid's polytheism yields to Christian monotheism (AA 1.637-40): 1t is
necessary there should be a God', and the innocent 'may depend on the
Care of his Providence' (= numen adest, or roughly, 'The Force is with
you). Though he had earlier noted that Ovid's 1nstructions are calculated
for much more than concessa furta' (AA 1.33 = note I), Fielding's lover has a
'Keeper' for his rival, not Ovid's
'husband' (AA 1.579, Loeb). One
kind of fidelity trumps another.
Finally, Fiedling uses burlesque to conform the social climate of the
Roman writer to that of the English reader. 'Lieutenant-General Achilles'
commands 'a large Body of Grenadiers', and his seduction of Deidameia is
reported in 'the Trojan Alamain' - i.e. a 'Trojan' equivalent of the
manuscript scandal-sheet current in eighteenth-century Paris, and much
cited by the London press (AA 1.679-704). 'Colonel 1heseus carried off Miss
Ariadne in a Campaign Wig without a single Curl in it' (AA 1.509-10),
illustrating the ancient truth that a sweet disorder in the dress adds to
masculine (as well as feminine) appeal. Sexual scandal is. barely worth
repeating without a keen sense of status, and the dimished lustre of English
high society does duty for the radiance of heroes and heroines in classical
myth.
All of these devices - fuller and more explicit transitions, bowdlerization,
and burlesque - operate syntactically, paraphrasing the logic of Ovid's poem
into its modern equivalent. Adaptation instead works on Ovid's lexicon,
substituting modern equivalents of unfamiliar names and customs; it
provides a kind of proof of the classic's abiding relevance, which Fielding
reinforced with 'learned' notes on the alien, Roman names. This explicit
acknowledgement of infidelity paradoxically demonstrates that the English
metonymy is apter than the 'literal' Roman original. By a further paradox,
Fielding's metonymical succedaneum often requires annotation for its
aptness to be understood today - as his paraphrase would not, if more of his
present-day readers understood Latin.
The most elaborate of his personal metonyms has already been noticed the transformation of Gaius Caesar into Cumberland. Whereas Ovid's
15. L.D. Reynolds and N.G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars, 2nd ed. (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1974), p.11.
16
Bibliographical Society ofA ustralia and New Zealand
portrait of Gaius was tinged with ironic awareness of the distortions of
Augustan propaganda, whose falsity in no way diminished its usefulness for
impressing a puella, Fielding's adaptation is pure panegyric: 1nvention
cannot here outdo the Reality' (AA 1.228). Most of his other equations,
however, are satirical: George Whitefield's 'Inspiration' is as good (or as bad)
as that of 'Master Apollo' (AA 1.25); Ovid's anonymous 'dish,velled peddler'
(Institor discinctus, AA 1.421) is recast as the fashionable London jeweller
William Deards, a continual bun of Fielding's satire; and a contemporary
spoof on Masonic parades translates the orgies of the Bacchants (AA 1.53738). Fielding uses metonymy more exuberantly than Ovid, and some names
have no Roman counterpart: a 'Clementinus Conerelius' introduces
Thrasius to Busiris (AA 1.649), as the Master of Ceremonies Sir Clement
Conerel (d.1758) might have ushered in a visitor to a royal audience in
England. Philip Miller, gardener to the Apothecaries' Company, provides a
modern, authoritative source for Ovid's Nec tellus eadem parit omnia (AA
1.757); and John Oldmixon's histories are no less numerous than Ovid's
proverbial grains of sand (AA 1.254).
The transformation of Rome into London requires even more extensive
changes, equating the Forum with Westminster Hall, gladiatorial combats in
the Circus Maximus with the execution of Jacobite traitors at the Tower of
London, Roman triumphs with the London Lord Mayor's show, Roman
porticoes with London pleasure gardens like Ranelagh and Vauxhall, and
Baiae with Bath and other fashionable English spas (AA 1.67-100, 135-48,
162-70, 253-62). Unlucky Roman days are duly matched with English
superstitions (AA 1.405-20), and huntin', fishin' and shootin' naturalize
Ovid's frequent predatory metaphors for love (AA 1.45-50, 763-66). Perhaps
the cleverest such analogy is the equation of Richard N ash ('the God
CNASH'), succeeding Prince Bladud as 'King' of Bath, with the King of
Nemi (Rex Nemorensis), guarding the Golden Bough in succession to Numa,
both wedded to nymphs (AA 1.259-62). 'Beauties are as plenty in the City of
London as Apples in Herefordshire, or Grains of Wheat in Hampshire' - but
in Rome, as 'Bunches of Grapes in Methymna; a City of Lesbia' and 'Ears of
Corn in Gargara; which was in Mysia, a Province of the Hellespont' (AA
1.57-58; font reversed); the homely English clashes with the learned notes.
These adaptations flavor the entire version with wit, satire, and even an
occasional element of burlesque ('Clementinus Conerelius' and 'the God
CNASH'). Ovid's irreverence (nequitia) ranged more widely than Fielding's,
but he could scarcely have found a more congenial translator in an
'Augustan Age', which rather favored the tear-swept pieties of Virgil and the
curious felicities of bibulous, foot-stamping, patriotic, sententious Horace."
16. L.P. Wilkinson, Ovid Recalled (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1955), who, however, may exaggerate the ascendancy of Horace and Virgil at this
The Texts ofFielding's Ovid
17
Nevertheless, most of Fielding's version is straightforward, and he
modernized numerically little of Ovid's mythology: the extended examples
of Ramulus (AA 1.101-34), Pasiphae (AA 1.289-326) and Ariadne (AA 1.52564) retain their ancient names and settings, with only a few witty
retouchings. The 'Tambourine', familiar to London theatre-goers, replaces
the tripudium, danced for Ramulus, and Fielding briefly compares
Pasiphae's lust to that of 'Mrs. Mary Hamilton', the sensational lesbian
heroine of his Female Husband (1746), and recasts 'Mr. Alderman Minos' in
the time-honored role of a cuckoldy cit. Large sections of the poem,
moreover, are timeless accounts of wooing and winning that need no
adaptation. Overall, no more than a quarter of Ovid's lines were
paraphrased or adapted; to anyone acquainted with Latin, the fluency and
disciplined freedom of Fielding's version should be more impressive than
the wit with which he warps Roman into English realia. If his version at
times deserts the facing Latin without employing these witty devices, then,
we will do well to explore the reasons, instead of dismissing the apparent
'deviation' as an inevitable part of a 'paraphrase'.
In many places, Fielding is clearly translating a variant or conjecture
found in a different text than Henry Woodfall's Latin. He specially
mentions Jacob Micyllus's edition (1549) in one note and repeats Nicolaus
Heinsius's correction of Scaliger in another. 17 Heinsius's epochal edition
(1658-1661) was either the immediate or the remote source of nearly all
subsequent editing of Ovid, by Schrevel (1662), Cnipping (1670), and
Crespin (1689) in usum Dephini, the Electa from Ovid, Propertius, and
Tibullus that Fielding studied at Eton, and Burman's unannotated editio
minor (1713). Even the Stationers' Company's ancient schooltext, originally
a reprint of the later Aldine text (1533-1534) of Andrea Navagero, added a
marginal apparatus from Heinsius in its editions of 1694-1709. Fielding may
have encountered Micyllus in the enlarged recension of Gregor Bersman
(1596), but whatever edition or editions he owned or used - and only a
broken set of a nondescript edition of Ovid appears in the catalogue of his
period. Cf. Wi11iam B. Piper, The Heroic Couplet (Cleveland, Ohio: Press of Case
Western Reserve University, 1969), pp.32-48, for the Ovidian elements of that
major eighteenth-century verse-form; Gay's Trivia and Pope's Rape of the Lock are
thoroughly Ovidian in spirit; and Samuel Johnson noted the 'Ovidian graces' of
Pope's Homer, and an echo of Ovid even in his 'Horatian' Epistle to Dr. A rbuthnot,
11.127-130, Fielding's friend James Harris remarked his 'particular' study of Ovid
(C.T. Probyn, The Sociable Humanist [1991], p.305).
17. Ovid's Art of Love Paraphrased (1747), notes s (2nd sequence) and 0,
respectively.
18
Bibliographical Society ofAustralia and New Zealand
library!' - their substance was cumulated in Pieter Burman's editio maior of
Ovid (1727), a conspectus of the entire corpus of post-incunabular Ovidian
scholarship.
Neither Fielding nor Woodfall escaped Heinsius's pervasive influence,
though they received it independently. Thus, 'Mind all, as myoId
Schoolmaster used to say' impons a classroom scene that is absent from the
facing Latin, 'faciles advenite mentes', but present in the variant favored by
Heinsius, dociles (AA 1.267). Fielding speaks of 'Gnossian and Cydonian
Heifers', whereas the facing Latin has 'Gnossiadesque Sidoniadesque
juvencae', raising some question of the poor beasts' location: in Sidon,
Phoenicia (Sidonidesque), or in Cydonia, Crete, where they belong and
where Heinsius placed them (reading Cydoneaeque, AA 1.293). This is not
simply Fielding's interpretation of a Renaissance spelling, since he shonly
afterwards refers to 'Agenor King of Cydon' - an error in the reverse
direction. The Latin text has Pasiphae accuse her bovine rival 'Nee dubito
quin se placere putet', whereas the English has 'Let me die, but she is silly
enough to think her Airs become her', reading decere with Heinsius (AA
1.316). Woodfall's Latin warns that a mistress may be swollen with her own
'conceit' (fastus, AA 1.715), whereas Fielding, with Heinsius, speaks of her
'immoderate Airs' (jlatus).
Occasionally, Fielding echoes the emendations of some other editors,
probably accessed through Burman's apparatus. At AA 1.114, Woodfall
printed the received, ungrammatical reading, 'Rex populo praedae signa
petenda dedit.' Grammar requires petendae, but it is unmetrical, and Burman
therefore conjectured repente or, as Fielding translated it, 'Ramulus on a
sudden gave the Signal for falling on'. Again, AA 1.569 advises the lover to
say covertly many secrets ('Hie tibi multa licet sermone latentia tecto /
dicere) - or rather, as Fielding translates it, 'by afictitious Name' ('sermone
ficto', Bersman) to say 'an hundred amorous things' ('multa licentia',
Burman). Fielding's major domo is liable to '[push] the Bottle funher than is
necessary' ('Et sibi mandatis plura bibenda putet', AA 1.588), with Micyllus,
not, as in Woodfall's Latin, to 'assume that more matters ought to be under
his care [= vivenda] than he was charged with'. 'In addition to
magis] this
one fraud', the Latin seems to say of lovers' oaths (AA 1.644), 'a Gentleman
will be ashamed of breaking his Word'; Fielding seems to have read minus
('in all other Anicles', 'apan from'), with Navagero, and many later editors.
When Fielding's translation deserts the facing Latin without the suppon
of an earlier conjecture or variant, he probably relied on a reading of his
own. In a rather obscure allegory, Ovid notes the affinity between love
18. Frederick G. and Anne G. Ribble, Fielding's Library: An Annotated Catalogue
(Charlottesville: Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 1996), entry
014.
The Texts ofFielding's Ovid
19
(Amor) and wine (Bacchus), but then seems to hint that their combination is
harmful ('Sed tamen aspergi pectus amore noce/', AA 1.236; 'but once
bedewed with love, the heart succumbs' [Moore]). Burman will have none of
it: 'Can nocet really be right? So, avid, why are you teaching a noxious art?
On the contrary, I think he teaches [docet] the bosom [to be sprinkled] with
love. Cupid indeed can swiftly shake off the effects of wine; nevertheless,
wine teaches love to enter the bosom' (my translation)." Fielding too
ignores love's destructive force, but by a less obtuse emendation: 'if he
happens to shake his wet Wings, [Cupid] may possibly sprinkle the Bosom of
your Mistress with Love'; he seems to have read posset. Both he and Burman
assume that the mistress is the one affected by Love's shower, whereas
modern readings point to the lover.
One might have thought that the opening of avid's account of the Rape
of the Sabines was clear enough:
Primus sollicitos fecisti, Romule, ludos,
Cum juvit viduos rapta Sabina viros. (AA 1.101-2)
- in Woodfall's Latin; 'With Ramulus the scandal first began, / When
ravished Sabines cheered his wifeless clan' (Moore). Fielding's English
marches to a different drummer, 'Romulus was the first Person who ever
made this use of the Theatre, when he ordered his Soldiers to fall foul on
the Sabine Ladies, whom he invited to a Play acted by his Command.'
Fielding apparently read 'Primus sollicitatos [i.e. 'instigated' = 'acted by his
Command'] fecit Ramulus ludos / Cum jussit viduis raptam Sabinam viris';
which, however, is unmetrical, even allowing that a consonant + s need not
make position.
Again, avid advises the lover to act fast, while his mistress's resentment
for her husband's infidelity is still hot, since 'Ut fragilis glacies, interit ira
mora' (AA 1.374) or, in Dryden's translation:
Give their first fury leisure to relent,
They melt like ice, and suddenly repent.
Fielding, however, attributes her resentment to the lover's delay: 'no Time
must be lost; lest the Passions she [the maid] hath raised should again
subside; and Resentment intervene by Delay, and freeze up her Love as Ice
doth Water.' Evidently he took interit in the etymological sense of
'intervene', and read 'Ut friget glacies'.
The title-page of Fielding's paraphrase claimed that it contained 'A most
CORRECT Edition of the Original', but it lied. Some fourteen verb-forms
are suspect, because they depart both from the textus receptus and from
19. An vero nocet? cur ergo Nasa artem noxiam doces? immo vero pUWj pectus
amore dacet. ille quidem vini vim velociter excutere potest; sed docet tamen amorem
penetrare in pectus.
20
Bibliographical Society
0/Australia and New Zealand
Fielding's translation. Apart from strange word-divisions (AA 1.336, 408,
and 486) and a mere vox nullius (Fbaula, AA 1.681), Ovid's elegant Greek
accusatives (Andromedan, Hermionen) troubled the compositor or his copytext (AA 1.11,53,745), producing the hero Andromedos ('Andromedon') and
the heroine Hermio ('HermionemJ, both unknown to antiquity. Quod,
ducum, excudit, ille, tempore, levis, hircus (AA 1.59, 181,235, 352, 510, 761,
and 762, respectively) should be emended to conform to Fielding's text, the
tradition, grammar, sense, and authority. The punctuation of Woodfall's
text is inordinately heavy and often nonsensical, and its spelling is
antiquated: Phyllirides, Aemonia, autor) lacryma, Sidonia) fraena, Gnossias,
/oemina, sydus, sylva were obsolescent forms by Fielding's day, though one
can only rarely determine what spelling he favored. From the Latin
quotations in his other works - probably the most reliable evidence, since
many were written out from memory - one can pick out parallels like
chams, lachryma,foelix,foemina, or sepulcher, and it seems likely that he was
less progressive in such matters than Bentley or Burman.
As E.}. Kenney observes, most early modern editors conceived of their
task as emending or defending a textus receptus, ordinarily that of the editio
princeps or some early prestigious edition like the Aldines. 20 Psychologically,
the practise tends to foreground the uncertainty of the tradition - as
opposed to the 'scientific' dogmatism of 'the method of Lachmann', pilloried
by Housman; an eighteenth-century apparatus is far more extensive than a
nineteenth-century edition's, overlaying the text with vocal strata of
variants, corrections and conjectures. It was an age when the animus suspicax
throve: Father Simon cast doubt on the text of the Bible, Bentley rewrote
Milton, emendation of Shakespeare was a household trade, and the Pere
Hardouin proposed that nearly all of ancient literature was a monkish
forgery. Like many of his contemporaries, Fielding read his classics pen in
hand, ready to remove any difficulty or even to 'improve' on what, one
might have thought, was unexceptionable. 21
The paraphrases, adaptations, imitations, and burlesques of the classics so
characteristic of the period were symptomatic of the anxiety aroused by this
rash of divination, and, curiously enough, Fielding practised the same sort
20. E.]. Kenney, The Classical Text· Aspects 0/ Editing in the Age 0/ the Printed
Book (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974).
21. As did Richard Bentley, in his copy of Burman's editio maior of Ovid (1727),
now in the British Library, shelf mark 681.d.6-9 (edited by Edmund Hedicke,
Studia Bentleiana, V[1905]); and cf. Anthony Granon, '1s Reading a Marginal
Enterprise? Guillaume Bud" and his Books', Papers 0/ the Bibliographical Society 0/
America, 91(1997): 139-157.
21
The Texts ofFielding's Ovid
22
of letter-juggling that he himself condemned in Bentley and Warburton. In
an age of 'verbal criticism', as nineteenth-century editors characterized it, it
could hardly have been otherwise: the dating of manuscripts was in its
infancy, and their stemmatic relationships were often ignored. 'The younger
Burmann's great edition of 1780', observed Housman, 'presents an imperfect
and inaccurate collation of some five and twenty MSS. good and bad and
indifferent: the authority for this reading or that, if reckoned at all, is
ascertained by the simple process of adding up the codices which offer it. If
one MS. weighs heavier than its fellows, that is because it has had the luck
to be collated twice over under the different names of Mentelianus and
Leidensis primus and accordingly counts as two'." However superior in
humanity and a sense of humor Fielding may have been, he fell far short of
these masters in critical acumen.
1 know of only a single instance where the Latin serves to correct the
English: Ariadne should not complain of the cruelty of Theseus 'to the deep
Waves' but 'to the deaf Waves' (AA 1.531, surdas ondas), an obvious
typographical error. I think we must conclude that Fielding did not prepare
the Latin that Woodfall printed: he did not copy out or emend a printed
text or correct the Latin in proof; his English wanders from the facing Latin
both when it is right and when it is wrong. The general incorrectness of the
Latin is more telling evidence of Fielding's absence than its failure to
incorporate his emendations. Contemporary editors might refrain from
emending their text even when they had a satisfactory reading to propose,
and indeed, when they did emend, they would ordinarily cite the corrupt
reading as their lemma in the footnote, rather than the 'true reading' that
they had promoted to the text. Thus we might consider Fielding's Latin as a
kind of lemma to his paraphrase, which serves as an apparatus to 'emend'
the facing text. The many rypos, mispunctuations, and verbal errors of the
Latin, however, surely indicate that Fielding never prepared or proofed it.
For a critical edition of Fielding's Ovid, one would theoretically prefer to
base the Latin on the edition that he translated: Burman's editio maior (1727)
would have been the most compendious and readily accessible source for his
purposes, and Fielding is very likely to have owned a copy. As a student at
the University of Leiden in 1728-29, he may have attended Burman's
lectures, one of which - an ironic attack on the humanities - he relished in
22. The Covent-Garden Journal and A Plan of the Universal Register-Office, ed.
Bertrand A. Goldgar (Middlerown, Ct.: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), pp.I9296, and other essays by Fielding, cited by Goldgar, p.192, n.3.
23. A.E. Housman, 'The Manuscripts of Propertius (1892, 1894)', in Selected
Prose, ed. John Carter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), p.66.
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Bibliographical Society ofAustralia and New Zealand
the Champion." He owned three other editions by Burman - his Petronius,
Quintilian, and Valerius Flaccus - and eighteenth-century authorities
regularly cite Burman's Ovid as the 'best edition' (editio praestantissima).25
Nevertheless, even if Fielding had owned a copy, he used its authority too
eclectically for us to establish it as the source of his paraphrase; a variorum
edition offers too many possibilities to be accommodated in a simple
stemma." At best one can make out the latest layer that Fielding consulted
in the preparation of his version - whether he drew on an original edition, a
later reprint, or Burman's citation.
In default of Fielding's original, one would like to use the Latin edition
that Woodfall reprinted, whose identity is also somewhat less ambiguous.
Since there is some reason to suppose that W oodfall did not correct it, his
copy-text cannot be earlier than the latest readings found in it, and it is
clearly post-Heinsian, readingfacito, aliquam and vultu (AA 1.225, 501, and
730, respectively) with Heinsius and against the textus receptus (the last
emendation seems especially telling). At lines 191-92, Woodfall also reads
animis with Burman and Heinsius (and Fielding), as against annis with
Merula, Navagero, the Eton Electa minora, and modern editions. Woodfall,
then, probably reprinted an edition of A rs Amataria dating from in or after
1661. Like many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century texts, its spelling
occasionally harks back to the Renaissance, reading, for example, Aemania
and Phyllirides (AA 1.6 and 11) with Aldus (1502-03). It cannot derive
directly from Aldus, however, since Aldus printed two spurious lines after
1.332 explaining the difference between the two Scyllas, whereas Woodfall
24. Burman has generally been regarded as a laborious pedant, a fit butt for any
Augustan satirist; but see Bertrand A. Goldgar, "The Learned English Dog":
Fielding's Mock Scholarship', in Augustan Subjects, ed. Albert J. Rivero (Newark:
University of Delaware Press, 1997).
25. Ribbles, nos.Pll, Ql and PI; Publii Ovidii Nasonis Opera omnia, 5pts. in 4v.
(4to) (Amstelodami: Apud R. & J. Wetstenios, & G. Smith, 1727). Also issued with
the imprints of (2) F. Changuion, and (3) Janssonius van Waesberge, who also
printed it (cf. A.M. Ledeboer, Het geslacht van Waesberge, 2. verm. uitg. [1869],
p.170) on (a) large paper (double inner margin - 59mm) and (b) small paper (47mm). Most copies have an expurgated preface dated 'KaI. Octob. MDCCXXVII';
the suppressed text, excoriating the Amsterdam booktrade, dated 'KaI.
Novembribus MDCCXXVII', was reprinted in folio and first published in 1756 or
7. Copies: Harvard (issues lb, 2b, 3b); British Library (issues la, 2a, the latter with
the suppressed preface); Bodleian (issue 3a); in all copies seen, v.3, sig. Vvv3 and vA,
sig. T4 are cancels.
26. Cf. Grundy Steiner, 'The Textual Tradition of the Ovidian Incunabula',
Transactions oJ the American Philological Association, 83(1952): 312-18; it is probably
significant that his projected stemma of sixteenth-century editions was never
published.
The Texts ofFielding's Ovid
23
omits them, and Fielding explains the difference in his commentary. Thus,
any resemblance to the Aldine editions must be mediated by their
descendants and the ancestors of Woodfall's copy-text," and indeed the
Aldines had already become collector's items by Fielding's day and were far
too valuable to entrust to the inky fingers of a printer.
One work comes close to meeting all of these textual criteria: the
Heroidum epistolae of the Stationers' Company, a collection of Ovid's
Amatoria and minor poems for the use of schools, forming vol.3 of an
edition of his works. The earliest editions were part of a ten-year patem in
avid's works granted to Thomas Vautrollier on 19 June 1574, and
afterwards emered successively to Thomas Marsh and H. Stringer before
falling into the English Stock in 1613. Vautrollier's edition (1583) was a
straightforward reprint of a Plantin property (1560, etc.), which combined
the text and notes of Andrea Navagero (1533-34) with Guy Morillon's notes
and summaries on the Heroides, first published in Paris, 1507, and
subsequently in numerous editions by Sebastien Gryphius at Lyon." The
editions that were printed by or for the Stationers' Company in the
sevemeenth century shed the sidenotes, while retaining Navagero's name on
the title-page and not infrequently modifying the text. Such unannotated
texts were better suited for classroom use, where the master supplied the
necessary commentary; annotations, indeed, were generally regarded as no
better than a crib." In 1694, the work was revised, with notes and
emendations from Heinsius and Schrevel added in the margin, possibly by
Andrew Tooke, then a master of Charterhouse. JO His father Benjamin
27. The Ribbles cite Sheridan Baker for the proposition that the text is 'based ...
on the Aldine edition of 1503 (or one of its derivatives)', with some readings from
Burman. I have tried
to
make this perception more precise. Aldus's descendants
include the edition of Daniel Heinsius (1629), which formed the basis for his son's
text (Kenney, Classical Texts, p.69).
28. Lean Voet, The Plantin Press (1555-1589), 6v. (Amsterdam: Van Hoeve, 19801983), nos. 1842-43. Where Plantin printed the text in roman, however, Vautrollier
followed Aldus and Gryphius, using italic. Ann Moss, Ovid in Renaissance France
(London: Warburg Institute, 1982), 'Check-list of editions' (pp.66-79), nos.45, 104,
109, etc.; Sybille van Giiltlingen, Bibliographie des livres imprimis aLyon au seizieme
siede, t.5 (Baden-Baden: V. Koerner, 1997), no.265, etc.
29. See generally, M.L. Clarke, Classical Education in Britain, 1500-1900
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), pp.93·94; and on Busby's practise
at Westminster School, Joseph M. Levine, The Battle of the Books (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1991), p.55.
30. Andrew Tooke (1673-1732; DNB) later edited the Tristia (1720). ESTC
records all editions after 1694 in unique copies, at the Bodleian (1705 edn.), Rutgers
(1709 edn.) and the Auckland City Libraries, New Zealand (1719 edn.). I am
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Bibliographical Society ofAustralia and New Zealand
Tooke entered the new property 'in trust' for the English Stock in the
Stationers' Register, and it was reprinted (with corrections) in 1705 and
1709. In 1719, however, Samuel Palmer recast the work from the traditional
octavo format, in which it had been edited ever since Aldus, into
duodecimo, omitting the sidenotes, for which duodecimo scarcely afforded
space (see Figure 1); in this format the work continued in print down to at
least 1766, though no copy of any later edition seems to have survived."
Throughout its history, the Stationers' text seems to have been in
continuous flux, from editorial emendations as well as from frequent
compositorial errors, though, exceptionally, the 1719 edition is a faithful
reprint of 1709, apart from the omission of the sidenotes. The 1686 edition,
indeed, shares four obvious errors with Woodfall; Achillen, finxit,
A ndromedon , and Quod (AA 1.11, 23, 53, and 59 respectively); in other
respects, the two texts might be conformed simply by adopting the marginal
readings of Tooke's edition - a mix-and-match that would have required no
more than a grammar-school knowledge of Latin to produce 'a most
CORRECT Edition'. Though some such hypothesis might plausibly account
for most of Woodfall's text, however, it will not explain why he omitted the
two spurious lines on Scylla, nor can we specifically prove the actual source
of his Heinsian conjectures. What form the Stationers' text took after 1719
can only be conjectured, moreover. Conceivably, the edition statement on
Fielding's title-page descends from some later revision of their property, hut
all that we can say with certainty is that Woodfall's text, despite some
striking similarities, is not completely identical with any surviving edition
of the property, and that Fielding, at least, did not 'correct' it.
What then remains from our failure to identify any single authority for
Fielding's Latin? Surely, the location of the text in a 'various' community of
scholarship and a multiplicity of textual sources, of uneven value - some 286
Mss. of Ovid that Heinsius cited for his edition (as against 37 in the edition
of E.]. Kenney [1994D. 32 Unlike Lachmann and his successors, who
retrieved Promethean fire from antiquity by an eliminatio codicum
descriptorum," the eighteenth-century editor (or paraphraser) does not stand
in judgment on the past hut participates in and passes on an uncertain
particularly indebted to Donald Ken, Curator of the Rare Book Collection in
Auckland, for allowing me xeroxes in which to study his copy of the 1719 text.
31. The duodecimo edition (presumably, in a later reprint) is listed in 'A
Catalogue of the School Books now in General Use', in A Catalogue of All the
English Books ... for these sixty years past (1766), pp.89·92.
32. M.D. Reeve} Cieinsius's Manuscripts of Ovid', Rheinisches Museum fur
Philologie, n.F. 117(1974): 133-66; 119(1976): [65]-78. Cf. Housman's comment on
Burman's Propertius, above, n.23.
33. Kenney, Classical Texts, p.l06.
The Texts ofFielding's Ovid
25
illustration
Ovid, Heraidum epistolae (1719): the subject, form, and authority of the contents are symbolized by Cupid holding a flaming heart, and yutti supporting a
book and the arms of the Stationers' Comnpany. Courtesy oj the Auckland City
Libraries (gift afSir George Grey, 1891; retouched).
26
Bibliographical Society ofAustralia and New Zealand
Medieval heritage from and to a community of polite (and often impolite)
learning." Fielding's library contained multiple editions and translations of
his favorite classical authors, the physical counterpart of the variorum,
ventriloquial text of his Ovid, which speaks with the voices of Andrea
Navagero (1483-1529), Jacob Micyllus (1503-58), Gregor Bersman (15381611), Nicolaus Heinsius (1620-81), Pieter Burman (1668-1741), Andrew
Tooke (1673-1732), and Henry Woodfall (1686?-1747). Fielding's anonymous voice is so distinctive that we are in some danger of losing this
collectivity, which exists between the Latin text and his paraphrase, in the
dialectical emergencies of their disagreement and of the Roman past and
English present.
Brookline, Massachusetts
34. Cf. Levine, Battle 0/ the Books, and Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning (New
Haven, Ct.: Yale University Press, 1995). Bentley's attempt to stand above the fray,
in the contest over 'Phalaris', doomed him to defeat. An appeal from social to
scholarly values was forbidden, even though, as Goldgar argues (p.7), the early
Republic of Letters strove to place 'their own community' above social, political
and religious ideology; 'In his own country Bentley was for many years a prophet
almost without honour' (Kenney, Classical Text, pp.114-15).