Begović and Ovid: Myrrha
Autor institution: Hrvatska akademija znanosti i umjetnosti i Sveučilište u Zagrebu
Abstract:
Begović published Myrrha, play in three acts, under a pseudonym in 1902 in Prague. It was never staged in a theatre, and was published in Croatia only in the 3 rd volume of Collected Works of Milan Begović in 2005. Myrrha received modest critical attention. Begović takes over all of the play’s plot from the 10 th canto of Metamorphoses, and he takes from Ovid the three main characters – king Kinyras, his daughter Myrrha and her nanny – and the relationships among them. He individualizes Myrrha’s numerous suitors in the characters of a Prince from the East and a shepherd Tityros, which do not appear in Ovid. He interrupts the action immediately after the recognition scene, which in the play occurs at the end of Kinyras and Myrrha’s one and only love encounter. Incestuous passion of the daughter for her father, which Ovid ascribes to the workings of one of the Erinyes, he interprets as a consequence of a dream in which Aphrodite gives Myrrha the task to conceive Adonis with her father, and formulates the play’s basic aesthetic- ethic principle: “Everything for love and beauty […] Love and beauty are eternal: only that is sin which does not serve them.”