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Reviving The Statue: Early Modern Representations of the Myth
of Niobe, from Golding to Shakespeare
Abstract
Depicted in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Niobe is a woman who turns to
a weeping stone in grief when her fourteen children are all
murdered as a punishment for her boasting. This essay explores
the presence of this rather overlooked myth in early modern
literature. The first half traces a shift in interpretations of the story
where an outspoken woman suffers from the staggering
vindictiveness of a cruel goddess, into a ‘Christianised’ narrative
which seems to applaud the humiliation of Niobe by a male force.
In the second half, it is argued that John Donne and William
Shakespeare, in ‘Twicknam Garden’, Hamlet and The Winter’s Tale,
evoke the myth, with the problematic undertones it carries, to
subvert it. Though similar metamorphoses are suggested each
time, these texts ‘de-petrify’ the statue, letting the women go free,
and critiquing (to various extents) the male characters who have
such restrictive views. As well as being an original, detailed
exploration of the reception of Niobe in early modern England, the
essay finds that, particularly with regard to the story of gender it
presents, the myth may have impacted the work of some of
the major writers of the period.
Keywords: Niobe; Shakespeare; Donne; gender; interpretative
history.
In the Ovidian myth of Niobe, a mother is punished by a vengeful goddess for
boasting about having more offspring than her. Niobe’s fourteen children are all
killed, and grief at this turns her to a perpetually weeping, statue-like stone.
The ways in which early modern writers interpret - and, especially, Christianise
- this myth tell an interesting story about conceptions of gender in this period.
The Ovidian account allows for much ambiguity as to the justice of the gods in
Niobe’s punishment; it could even be read as a narrative permissive of female
power. This story retains currency in the early modern period. When the
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spiteful goddess is turned into a male, supposedly ‘good’ Christian God,
however, the story is warped, even to the extent of being suggestive of a woman
being punished for being strong, supposedly with divine authentication.
"
These two, conflicting but coexisting perspectives on Niobe, and the
underlying views of women that the myth encompasses, resonate in the
literature that evokes her, directly or indirectly. After outlining the varying
attitudes to Niobe in early modern literature, this essay will look at three major
texts in which the masculinist version of the myth is, arguably, evoked to be
critiqued. In Donne’s ‘Twicknam Garden’, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet and The
Winter’s Tale, to various extents, the female characters are vindicated, freed from
their resemblances to suffering Niobe, and the men, who in all cases seem
guilty, forced to have some sympathy.
"
Ovid’s Metamorphoses were ‘Englished’ by Arthur Golding, published in
1567. The popularity of Golding’s work in the early modern period means that
it would probably have been a major source for the story of Niobe. This account
depicts a strong, though flawed female character with relative verisimilitude.
Niobe is somewhat at fault; she boasts that she has seven times as many
children as the goddess Latona, and seems to think she is invulnerable. She has
a kind of narcissistic pride in ‘The of-spring of hir selfe’.1 Yet this phrase may
also highlight the significance of Niobe’s seeming status as an independent
individual. Latona’s enraged decision to have all fourteen of Niobe’s children
killed, is of course partisan, and disproportionately brutal. Alessandro Schiesaro
writes that the Metamorphoses are situated ‘In a universe [...] in which the gods
are mired in the same contradictions and partialities as humans’, and
‘knowledge can be entrusted only to a variety of accounts, fragmentary and
biased as they inevitably are’. 2 The gods are not ‘just’. Niobe is said to pray for
her last daughter, in Golding’s vocabulary, but ‘while she praid, for whom she
1
Arthur Golding, trans. The xv. Bookes of P. Ovidius Naso, Entitled, Metamorphosis, K5r.
2
Alessandro Schiesaro, ‘Ovid and the professional discourses of scholarship, religion, rhetoric’, 74.
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praid was kild’.3 The close repetition of ‘praid’ next to the account of the brutal
denial of her prayers drives home the suggestion that the gods are wilfully deaf
to her requests - as well as, perhaps, suggesting that these women are not afraid
to ‘prey’ upon one another. As William Drummond interprets, the children of
‘Wretched Niobe’ seem to have been ‘reft by heavens unjust’.4 Golding’s
narrator does not condemn or belittle Niobe for her pride, but exclaims, at the
end of the section: ‘Then all both men and women feare Latonas open ire’.5
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Latona’s actions are horrific, but her presence in the story as a mighty
goddess means that the account is not closed to the idea of female power. Niobe
is turned into a perpetually weeping stone on Mount Sipylus, but this demise
can hardly be seen as a story of overconfident women being brought low.
Latona’s terror earns her pride of place in Ben Jonson’s Fountaine of Selfe-Love,
where she bathes with ‘her carelesse Nimphes,[...] In hourely pleasures’, and
holds Niobe’s statue as ‘the proude Trophaee of her sharpe revenge’.6
"
This ‘pagan’ account of Niobe’s story, as shown above, does have its
respectable advocates in the early modern period: Ben Jonson; William
Drummond; Arthur Golding. However, as Raphael Lyne suggests, the norm in
adapting Ovid’s tales was to ‘Christianise’ them, giving them a moral.7 In 1592
Abraham Fraunce presented what may have been a more orthodox portrait of
Niobe, in a compendium purporting to tell ‘the most conceited tales of the
pagan gods in English hexameters together with their auncient descriptions and
philosophicall explications’.8 In the hexameter Apollo (Latona’s son) is said to
3
Golding, K7v.
4
William Drummond, ‘Niobe’, Poems, P3v.
5
Golding, K7v.
6
Ben Jonson, The Fountaine of Selfe-love. Or Cynthia’s Revels [...], B4r-B4v.
See Raphael Lyne, ‘Golding’s Englished Metamorphoses’, in Ovid’s Changing Worlds, 27-79, for an expansion
of the moralising history of Englished metamorphoses until Golding’s work.
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8
Abraham Fraunce,The third part of the Countesse of Pembrokes Yuychurch [...].
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have ‘Plagued prowd Niobe’ ‘worthily’.9 The ‘philosophicall explications’ are
even harsher in moral condemnation:
Niobe, for her excessiue pride and contempt of God, is worthily
plagued, yea so extreamely plagued in those very thinges wherein
she chiefly vaunted, that for very anguish of heart and untolerable
woe, shee is saide to bee turned into a dull and senceless marble
stone.10
Niobe’s pride is emphasised, and turned to signify that she had ‘contempt of
God’. More hauntingly, suddenly her femininity contrasts to the punisher’s
gender, as Apollo - subservient in the original story to his mother - takes her
place completely here. The commentator seems gratified by her punishment,
repeating feverishly that she was ‘plagued’, once preceded by the adjective
‘worthily’. He describes her final position - ‘a dull and senceless marble stone’ with contempt. In this strand of moralistic, gendered interpretation, the literary
character Niobe seems to suffer a fate uncannily similar to within the story. The
previously energised, sympathetic Niobe seems doomed to undergo a second
objectification when readers are led to disparage her from the start.
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In Fraunce’s account, the distinguishing of gender lines does not extend
to condemning Niobe for being a woman, but George Sandys’s translation of
the Metamorphoses, published over the 1620’s, shows the proximity of one thing
to the other. The sarcastic narrative emphasis upon female physical attributes
suggests that they are representative, or maybe even the cause, of her sin. Niobe
still rebels
Against the gods, and with proud language swels.
Many things sweld her.11
The story can easily sound misogynistic, as in John Donne’s epigram ‘Niobe’:
By childrens births, and death, I am become
9
Ibid, D2v.
10
Ibid, D4r.
11
George Sandys, Ovids Metamorphosis Englished by G.S., H3v.
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So dry, that I am now mine owne sad tombe.12
Barbara Correll, in a rare mention of Niobe in criticism of early modern
literature, suggests that this epigram represents ‘womb as tomb’.13 As if
punished for her own childbearing, her womanhood, Niobe is ‘So dry’ completely void of fertile value or sexual attraction. Notably, ‘death’ is singular;
this seems to suggest that ‘childrens births’, however multiple they be, lead to
‘death’ all round. It is unusual, and disconcerting, to hear a petrified Niobe
describing her own metamorphosis - ‘I am become’. Correll argues that ‘the
woman's voice functions to reassure the male poet (and coterie audience) of the
difference between symbolic, phallocentric plenitude on the one hand, and
abject impoverishment on the other’.14
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In her interpretative history, it looks as though the lively, prideful Niobe
has fallen a long way to become a woman condemned by a religiously justified
patriarchy, in some cases loathed, it seems, just for her obstinate femaleness.
Could this metatextual fall itself, however, have captured the imagination of
early modern writers? Niobe seems to have an uncanny habit of coming out of
her context, rebelling against this confinement. Going back to Donne’s epigram
above: the voice of Niobe, sad as it is, is not quite humiliated. The words,
written down, are uncanny; prosopopoeic. They do, after all, represent a statue
speaking. In its concision the epigram is like a remnant from a chillingly
meaningless universe, one in which Niobe’s static mortification, even and
especially in its gendered passivity, might be worryingly near even to men. One
of Donne’s laddish coterie readers may have read it aloud, and been tricked into
becoming Niobe.15
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Niobe arguably makes a displaced reappearance in another of Donne’s
poems, ‘Twicknam Garden’. Her name is not mentioned, but Donne may have
12
John Donne, ‘Niobe’, The Complete English Poems.
13
Barbara Correll, ‘Symbolic Economies and Zero-Sum Erotics: Donne’s ‘Sapho to Philaenis’’, 492.
14
Ibid.
15
For a history of the circulation of Donne’s poems, see Arthur F. Marotti, John Donne: Coterie Poet.
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had this story in mind again, when making his speaker toy with the idea of
being transformed to, among other things, ‘a stone fountain, weeping out my
year’ (18).16 Donne perhaps goes a step further than in his epigram here,
assigning Niobe-like fantasies to this unmistakably male speaker. With some
ironic humour, in this poem the usual gender roles in the Niobe story are
reversed: the speaker dramatises himself in the position of a victim, humiliated
by terrible female forces. ‘[B]lasted with sighs’ (1), he seems to ask for
transformation because a strong-willed woman will not have an affair with him:
‘O perverse sex, where none is true but she, / Who’s therefore true, because her
truth kills me’ (26-7).
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As well as inverting gender roles, Donne’s poem parodies the poetic
justice of the Christianised accounts of Niobe. If metamorphosis is construed as
punishment, it is afforded to the rampant misogynist. What can be said of a
man who admits he can only be killed by a true woman? Donne’s speaker
admits, just about, some guilt. It is he who has brought ‘the serpent’ to a place
which seems like ‘True Paradise’ (9), and ‘The spider love, which
transubstantiates all’ (6).
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Shakespeare also seems to have rewritten the story of Niobe, in Hamlet.
In the tragic hero’s first soliloquy, exclaiming with revulsion at his mother’s
inconstancy, he likens her, in her appearance whilst grieving her first husband,
to ‘Niobe, all tears’ (1.2.149).17 It could be seen as rather disturbing that Hamlet
is upset that Gertrude is no longer like Niobe, frozen in barren grief. Hamlet has
more reason than most in the Niobe stories to wish that womb had indeed
become its own tomb: ‘Gertrude has, by her remarriage, effectively cut off
Hamlet from his hereditary entitlement’.18 Perhaps this prompts his monstrous
statement about women, suppressed in a parenthetical remark - ‘(Let me not
think on’t - Frailty, thy name is Woman)’ (146). However, he cannot help the fact
16
Donne, ‘Twicknam Garden’, The Complete English Poems.
17
William Shakespeare, Hamlet.
18
Lisa Jardine, ‘‘I am Duchess of Malfi Still’: Wealth, Inheritance and the Spectre of Strong Women’, 92.
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that Gertrude has been freed. More peculiarly, it seems that Hamlet is, deep
down, very similar to Niobe. In his grief, he expresses desires to turn ‘all tears’
himself: ‘O that this too too sallied flesh would melt, / Thaw and resolve itself
into a dew’ (129-30). He resolves, at the end of this speech, to be silent - ‘break,
my heart, for I must hold my tongue’ (159). It would be going too far to say that
Hamlet is justly silenced as a punishment for his misogynistic rant, but it is true
that, in this silence, he can no longer rail against his mother, and the male
accuser experiences some of the powerlessness usually conferred on the female
accused in the Niobe myth.
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Shakespeare does not mention Niobe in his tragicomedy, The Winter’s
Tale, but this play arguably gives a more radical, plot-level rewriting of the story
he had already discussed in Hamlet. The first half of the play is truly tragic. It is
as though Shakespeare decided to take the opposite stance to the usual
moralistic reading, in straightening Ovid’s ambiguity to generate sympathy for
the Niobe-figure, not the gods. Hermione is a strong and articulate motherfigure, more persuasive than her husband in Act 1, Scene 2; this makes her,
perhaps, a sinless version of proud Niobe.19 However, Leontes suddenly
becomes convinced that his wife has been unfaithful to him (1.2). He almost
admits to the audience that he is the guilty one, stating that his knowledge has
been infected by suspicion, using the same imagery as the very comparable
speaker in ‘Twicknam Garden’: ‘I have drunk, and seen the spider’ (2.1.45; see
from line 39). This suspicion causes their son to die, ‘with mere conceit and
fear/ Of the queen’s speed’ (3.2.142-3). And ‘This news is mortal to the
queen’ (45): like Niobe, in grief for her dead child, Hermione is transformed.
Although she is declared ‘dead’, and Paulina’s descriptions are easier to
interpret as rigor mortis at this point, she is even here described like a stony
statue: she has no ‘Tincture or lustre in her lip’, or eye; no breath, or heat (202-3).
Antigonus’s descriptions of Hermione’s ghost at the loss of her daughter, too,
may also evoke Niobe in passing. She can talk (3.3.26-33), so she is more like
19
Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale.
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Donne’s Niobe than Ovid’s, but she weeps in fountains and is partmetamorphosed - ‘her eyes/ Became two spouts’ (3.3.24-5).
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Shakespeare highlights, through the shrill voice of Paulina, that
Hermione’s transformation is the result of male attitudes, not her own guilt:
‘Thy [Leontes’s] tyranny,/ Together working with thy jealousies’ (3.2.176-7).
Then, the guilty man is forced to become like Niobe. In serious repentance,
Leontes must grieve perpetually: he vows to ‘shed tears’ daily at Hermione’s
tomb, ‘So long as nature/ Will bear up with this exercise’ (3.2.237-8). However,
Niobe’s fate is changed, here, in the cases of Leontes’s perpetual mourning, and
Hermione’s petrifaction. Leontes is redeemed by a Christianity more optimistic
than one which equates God with vengeful Latona. Paulina had said that
nothing could ‘move the gods’ (3.2.210), but Leontes says, finally, that tears
‘Shall be my recreation’ (3.2.237). Instead of being frozen perpetually, Leontes
can have faith that his sins are forgiven; he is able to move on.
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Hermione’s resurrection could be said to combine Ovid and Christianity
in a new way. The play’s last scene, in which Paulina charms Hermione’s statue
to life in front of her family, has already been connected to the Metamorphoses.
Some have surmised that Hermione is like Pygmalion’s wife, transformed by
Venus from a statue to fulfil the sculptor’s desires.20 Eric Langley develops this
argument well to suggest that it is a pertinent misreading of Hermione’s statue
to assume that she is like Galatea: ‘Paulina guides Leontes away from following
the hot example of his incestuous predecessor, reminding him of his penitential
identity, averting his gaze’.21 Langley also observes Paulina’s insistence on
Leontes’ ‘faith’ to awaken Hermione; interestingly, it seems that his antimisogynistic conversion will allow her to live again.22 This conversion fits with
Niobe’s story as well as Pygmalion’s. With Niobe’s previous context, it seems
20
See John Pitcher’s introduction to The Winter’s Tale (Arden), 9-10.
21
Eric Langley, ‘’Postured like a Whore?’ Misreading Hermione’s Statue’, 320.
22
Langley, 331.
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revolutionary to use a Christian term to counteract attitudes which degrade
women.
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However, Hermione’s revival is not wholly dependent on her husband’s
holy will. The first time she speaks, it is to her daughter. Hermione’s own
excuses for her ‘preserving’ are conspicuously unrelated to Leontes: ‘I [...] have
preserved/ Myself to see the issue (5.3.125-8). Her issue, that also means.
Perhaps this makes Hermione more a vindication of Niobe’s motherly pride
than a baptism of Pygmalion. The magic is not wholly Christianised; the play is
not completely subdued by an order that requires men to have faith for women
to be freed. The figure of Latona, that sinister embodiment of female power,
perhaps remains looming over this play, albeit in more benevolent form.
Paulina, that ‘mankind witch’ (2.2.66) with godlike magical powers, and ‘of
boundless tongue’ (2.2.90), is the owner of the ‘Trophaee’-statue of Hermione.
Probably Latona, too, would have given a suitable (though perhaps not only
verbal) beating to a jealous tyrant man (see 3.2.172-199), if any had been foolish
enough to intervene in her story.
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Of course, the extent to which Shakespeare had Niobe in mind, in The
Winter’s Tale, cannot be known, although we do know that he had made
reference to her already and, possibly, taken the idea to heart in Hamlet. Nor is it
provable that Donne and Shakespeare pitied Niobe, especially not to the extent
of being inspired to critique and subvert the ‘Christianised’ view of her. Even
so, the myth of Niobe is still an interesting context to these texts, showing up
their comparable progressiveness in telling Ovidian stories of strong women,
and attributing the guilty transformations to men. And even if it were done
unwittingly, Donne’s and Shakespeare’s works offer a worthy sympathetic
commentary upon this obscure story which had been so misappropriated by the
moralists.
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Bibliography
Primary Sources
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Random House, 1991).
Drummond, William. Poems (Edinburgh: Printed by Andro Hart, 1616).
Jonson, Ben. The Fountaine of Selfe-love. Or Cynthia’s Revels [...]. (London: For Walter
Burre [...], 1601).
Ovid, The xv. Bookes of P. Ovidius Naso, Entitled, Metamorphosis., trans. Arthur Golding
(London: Imprinted by Robert Walde-graue, 1587).
Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. A.D. Melville (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press,
1986).
Sandys, George. Ovids Metamorphosis Englished by G.S. (London: Printed by Robert
Young[...], 1628).
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet, eds. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Arden
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Philaenis’’, ELH 62.3 (1985), 487-507.
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Women’, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare, 68-102.
(New York; London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989).
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Studies 27.3 (2013), 318-340.
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1986).
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