Mythic Still Movement and Parodic Myth in Spenser and Shakespeare

This essay argues for the essential importance of myth and parody to Renaissance writing and connects them with still movement, a punning paradox that both Spenser and Shakespeare engage. Still movement simultaneously opposes motion to stillness and conjoins them. Parody heightens the play of still movement, and Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis offers an exemplary instance of it that parodies Spenser’s many refractions of the same myth in his epic. Shakespeare’s epyllion also serves as a transition to a historicized treatment of parody that is inclusive enough to pertain to both Spenser and Shakespeare. Properly understood, the parodic still movement of myth broadens and deepens the Spenser-Shakespeare connection and significantly affects a reading of sacred, or biblical, myth at the end of King Lear and the myths operative at the end of The Winter’s Tale, which are variously biblical and classical and bear on the troubling death of Mamillius.