Metamorphosis and the Protean Performer

The god also merited extensive commentaries in period translations and appearances in works for the opera and fair theaters, collections of poetry, scientific and medical treatises, and of course Furetière’s Dictionnaire. Across this discourse, authors generated diverse interpretive readings, from metaphysical allegories originating in ancient, medieval, and renaissance interpretations, to modern enlightened euhemerist analyses in which Ovid’s myths are perceived to refer to historical persons and events. While François Couperin does not appear to have owned a copy of any one of the texts from this “grand siècle of French translations of Ovid,” the social dissimulators that appear within his pièces de clavecin certainly resemble Furetière’s Protean master of disguise. Moreover, “two small