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Disappearing daughters: Proserpina and Medea in the works of Spenser and Shakespeare
Abstract
The stories of Medea and of Proserpina had a profound influence, hitherto unrecognized, on the works of Shakespeare and Spenser. Medea's story, as it appears in Ovid's Metamorphoses (and in Golding's translation) and in Gower's Confessio Amantis, reappears throughout Shakespeare's canon. The age-old struggle of the young girl caught between her duty to her father and her love for a stranger is exemplified by Medea's situation, and it is played out at least three times in Shakespeare's drama, beginning as a subplot in The Merchant of Venice, moving into the opening act of Othello, and finally directing much of the action in The Tempest. In King Lear, both Shakespeare and Hecate, Medea's patron, punish the father for betraying the good daughter. For Spenser, the ambiguity of Medea's character is tempered by William Caxton's portrayal of her in The History of Jason, a previously unremarked source of The Faerie Queene. Here, Spenser finds a witch, Medea, her benign counterpart, Mirro, and a Jason who is torn between two women rather than between the "good" Medea who helped him to win the Golden Fleece and the "bad" Medea who arranged his uncle's murder. Spenser reincarnates Caxton's versions of Jason and Medea in the forms of Red Crosse and Duessa, thereby converting the pagan sinner Jason into a Christian hero. Proserpina's story serves as an antidote to Medea's in that the latter foregrounds infidelity while the former highlights the unbreakable bond between mother and daughter. In The Faerie Queene, Spenser improves on Ovid by transferring this bond from same-sex kinship to same-sex friendship, a higher type of love: Ceres and Proserpina find new life as Britomart and Amoret while Amoret's suitors embody various characteristics of Pluto/Death. In "The Cantos of Mutabilitie," Spenser rewrites Claudian's De Raptu Proserpinae, replacing endless repetition with unchanging eternity. In Shakespeare's works, Proserpina's rape is reenacted in the death of Ophelia in Hamlet while the reunion of Proserpina and Ceres and the resurrection of Ophelia are enacted in The Winter's Tale.
Subject Area
British and Irish literature
Recommended Citation
Thomsen, Kerri Lynne, "Disappearing daughters: Proserpina and Medea in the works of Spenser and Shakespeare" (1994). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9434541.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9434541