The Elizabethan Epyllion: From Constructed Classical Genre to Twentieth-Century Genre Propre

Abstract

The Elizabethan epyllion is a genre of mythological narrative poems that were popular in English Renaissance literature for several decades, with a climax in the 1590s. This chapter traces the history of scholarship on the Elizabethan epyllion in line with the history of the term “epyllion” as it was invented in classical scholarship around 1800. It is demonstrated that the designation of the Elizabethan epyllion as “epyllion” occurred considerably later than the initial introduction of “epyllion” into classical vocabulary. After an influential publication in 1931, however, the concept of the ancient “epyllion” was used to read Ovid’s Metamorphoses as a series of “epyllia,” which then—due to the Ovidian nature of the Elizabethan epyllion—recommended the term to English literary critics.