A comprehensive examination of Shakespeare's use of Ovid's epic poem, Metamorphoses.

This book is a study of Ovid and his poetry as a cultural phenomenon, conceived in the belief that such a study of tradition also casts fresh light on Ovid himself. Its main concern is with exploring the influence of Ovid on literature, especially English literature, but it also takes a wider perspective, including, for example, the visual arts. The book takes the form of a series of studies by specialists in their fields, including a number of scholars of international renown. The essays cover the period from the twelfth century, when there was an upsurge of interest in Ovid, through to the decline in his fortunes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They are critical and comparative in approach and collectively give a detailed sense of Ovid's importance in Western culture. Topics covered include Ovid's influence on Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Dryden, T. S. Eliot, the myths of Daedalus and Icarus and Pygmalion, and the influence of Ovid's poetry on art.

Elizabethan English culture is saturated with tales and figures from Ovid s Metamorphoses. While most of these narratives interrogate metamorphosis and transformation, many tales - such as those of Philomela, Hecuba, or Orpheus - also highlight heightened states of emotion, especially in powerless or seemingly powerless characters. When these tales are translated and retold in the new cultural context of Renaissance England, a distinct politics of Ovidian emotion emerges. Through intertextual readings in diverse cultural contexts, Ovid and the Politics of Emotion in Elizabethan England reveals the ways these representations helped redefine emotions and the political efficacy of emotional expression in sixteenth-century England.

This persuasive book analyses the complex, often violent connections between body and voice in Ovid's Metamorphoses and narrative, lyric and dramatic works by Petrarch, Marston and Shakespeare. Lynn Enterline describes the foundational yet often disruptive force that Ovidian rhetoric exerts on early modern poetry, particularly on representations of the self, the body and erotic life. Paying close attention to the trope of the female voice in the Metamorphoses, as well as early modern attempts at transgendered ventriloquism that are indebted to Ovid's work, she argues that Ovid's rhetoric of the body profoundly challenges Renaissance representations of authorship as well as conceptions about the difference between male and female experience. This vividly original book makes a vital contribution to the study of Ovid's presence in Renaissance literature.

Ovid: The Classical Heritage, first published in 1995, contains a diverse collection of reflections on a poet who has been adored and reviled in equal measure. Each essay indicates an theme or perspective which remains relevant to our self-understanding today. An enormous range of topics is investigated, in a variety of modes and styles: contemporary reaction, reception by Medieval Schoolmen, Ovid’s influence on Chaucer, and his importance for the ‘New Mythologists’.

This book explores how Ovid, as the poet-philosopher of the liberty of speech, galvanized poetic innovation in English Renaissance poetry.