Description:
As the embodiment of both order and disorder, the paradoxical figure of the labyrinth was a myth that fascinated English Renaissance culture. Its revealing power reached a climax during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Some artists enjoyed its popular echoes and favoured the familiar «maze» etymology, while others were attracted by the hostile «labyrinth» deeply rooted in a literate medieval background haunted by moralised versions of the dangerous «laborintus». Because of its threatening overtones, the fable was sometimes totally erased from literary texts, but many authors found ways of alluding to the Cretan meanders, thanks to linguistic stratagems that hint at their underlying presence. Gradually, a multifaceted labyrinth made its appearance in numerous poetic or dramatic works. It thus became a reinvented Elizabethan motif, with a specific Renaissance identity, constantly redefined by the distorted use of mythology.