Ovid was Shakespeare’s favourite poet. The fact is central to his genius, crucial to the understanding of his work. Shakespeare himself remains visible to posterity; Ovid is now, through the decay of Classical learning, almost invisible.
There is clear evidence that Shakespeare read and remembered Ovid’s Latin and was not confined to English translations. Shakespeare alludes to or borrows phrases from all 15 books of Ovid’s great mythological poem, the Metamorphoses
The Shakespeare industry roars on, but the number of people for whom Actaeon, Adonis, Arachne, Echo, Narcissus, Philomel and Tereus are mere un-meaning names grows greater with each successive year. For Shakespeare (and Keats and Eliot) such names are like windows opening on another world, which is like and unlike ours. Each name involves a story and story begets story in a living system of extraordinary richness. To forget all this is to experience absolute loss.
We have in general come to accept the account of Shakespeare gently offered by Ben Jonson, later hardened and simplified by Milton, as a poet without learning, warbling his ‘native woodnotes wild’. Jonson and Milton both knew far more Latin and Greek than Shakespeare, so perhaps they could afford such judgments
Circa 1590 the principal source of Marlowe’s glittering Hero and Leander, with its breathtakingly beautiful homoerotic description of Leander swimming, is Musaeus, but the tone is Ovidian, and this is Ovid unmoralised, undisguisedly erotic. Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis is a heterosexual Ovidian story but that scarcely renders it safe, for Venus is the active party, Adonis the pursued. As Jonathan Bate says, the poem is partly about a woman who wishes to rape a man and is frustrated by physiological difference
Enter the tedious moral stricture from the magisterial Jonson, in his play Poetaster, drew the moral conclusion: if that is what Ovid is really like, then Ovid must go, and Virgil, the poet of piety, honour, order and the idea of Rome, must come forward in his place. It must be granted that the Roman establishment, at least, thought as Jonson did. It seems that Ovid’s amorous poetry led to his banishment
Classical art, unlike Gothic or Romantic, had, we are told, a Vitruvian (orderly) stability. The history, rhetoric and poetry of the ancient world resembled its architecture in being unified, apprehensible and orderly
It will be obvious that to such a view of literary history Ovid is deeply embarrassing. The very title, Metamorphoses, warns us to expect not stability but flux. The severe marble figures of the Olympian gods are suddenly suffused with colour (like the figures on Keats’s Grecian urn, like the statue loved by Pygmalion) and quickened with erotic life. The stories themselves will not settle around a dominant, central narrative line but instead prove as joyously fecund as the persons they tell of. Ovid, therefore, is the unclassical Classical poet.
Ovid himself may have been conscious of an element of formal or literary transgression in his work. He refers to the ever-flowing stream of his poem as carmen perpetuum, ‘perpetual song’. This is likely to be a deliberate, arrogant inversion of the canon laid down by his Greek predecessor, Callimachus. Callimachus disliked long poems, believed strongly in the separate, sharply unified short poem and used the phrase ‘continuing song’ as a term of abuse. The situation is a remote pre-echo of something we have seen in our own century, not in fiction but in literary criticism: the New Critical emphasis on the separateness of the poem-in-itself succeeded by a structuralist intuition that literary knowledge is endlessly relational. This makes Ovid the great poet of différance, differentiation and endless deferral.
All this suggests that Ovid, if we could only read him, might be very much à la mode. (in fashion)
while Ovid may delight the timeless theorist, he constitutes a kind of scandal for the New Historicist.
(a method of literary criticism that emphasizes the historicity of a text by relating it to the configurations of power, society, or ideology in a given time)
As Laurence Lerner recently remarked, New Historicism can be summed up, not unfairly, as the doctrine that a poem is not for all time. All literary works, including the greatest, are embedded in history, their meaning wholly determined by contemporary pressures; the idea, so dear to Ben Jonson, that great art can over-arch history, can speak with its own authoritative voice to generations yet unborn, is chimerical (the product of unchecked imagination) Yet Bate is struck by the fact that Shakespeare seems genuinely able to use Ovid as a means of transcending his immediate historical situation.
The Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives was excited by the thought that beneath the fluid surface of things there lay an essential human nature It is an idea which we, in our time, have been taught, by a series of genuinely powerful arguments, to scorn none the less let us proceed
directly and without historical mediation to the myths of antiquity to explain sexual psychology
There is clear evidence that Shakespeare read and remembered Ovid’s Latin and was not confined to English translations. Shakespeare alludes to or borrows phrases from all 15 books of Ovid’s great mythological poem, the Metamorphoses
The Shakespeare industry roars on, but the number of people for whom Actaeon, Adonis, Arachne, Echo, Narcissus, Philomel and Tereus are mere un-meaning names grows greater with each successive year. For Shakespeare (and Keats and Eliot) such names are like windows opening on another world, which is like and unlike ours. Each name involves a story and story begets story in a living system of extraordinary richness. To forget all this is to experience absolute loss.
We have in general come to accept the account of Shakespeare gently offered by Ben Jonson, later hardened and simplified by Milton, as a poet without learning, warbling his ‘native woodnotes wild’. Jonson and Milton both knew far more Latin and Greek than Shakespeare, so perhaps they could afford such judgments
Circa 1590 the principal source of Marlowe’s glittering Hero and Leander, with its breathtakingly beautiful homoerotic description of Leander swimming, is Musaeus, but the tone is Ovidian, and this is Ovid unmoralised, undisguisedly erotic. Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis is a heterosexual Ovidian story but that scarcely renders it safe, for Venus is the active party, Adonis the pursued. As Jonathan Bate says, the poem is partly about a woman who wishes to rape a man and is frustrated by physiological difference
Enter the tedious moral stricture from the magisterial Jonson, in his play Poetaster, drew the moral conclusion: if that is what Ovid is really like, then Ovid must go, and Virgil, the poet of piety, honour, order and the idea of Rome, must come forward in his place. It must be granted that the Roman establishment, at least, thought as Jonson did. It seems that Ovid’s amorous poetry led to his banishment
Classical art, unlike Gothic or Romantic, had, we are told, a Vitruvian (orderly) stability. The history, rhetoric and poetry of the ancient world resembled its architecture in being unified, apprehensible and orderly
It will be obvious that to such a view of literary history Ovid is deeply embarrassing. The very title, Metamorphoses, warns us to expect not stability but flux. The severe marble figures of the Olympian gods are suddenly suffused with colour (like the figures on Keats’s Grecian urn, like the statue loved by Pygmalion) and quickened with erotic life. The stories themselves will not settle around a dominant, central narrative line but instead prove as joyously fecund as the persons they tell of. Ovid, therefore, is the unclassical Classical poet.
Ovid himself may have been conscious of an element of formal or literary transgression in his work. He refers to the ever-flowing stream of his poem as carmen perpetuum, ‘perpetual song’. This is likely to be a deliberate, arrogant inversion of the canon laid down by his Greek predecessor, Callimachus. Callimachus disliked long poems, believed strongly in the separate, sharply unified short poem and used the phrase ‘continuing song’ as a term of abuse. The situation is a remote pre-echo of something we have seen in our own century, not in fiction but in literary criticism: the New Critical emphasis on the separateness of the poem-in-itself succeeded by a structuralist intuition that literary knowledge is endlessly relational. This makes Ovid the great poet of différance, differentiation and endless deferral.
All this suggests that Ovid, if we could only read him, might be very much à la mode. (in fashion)
while Ovid may delight the timeless theorist, he constitutes a kind of scandal for the New Historicist.
(a method of literary criticism that emphasizes the historicity of a text by relating it to the configurations of power, society, or ideology in a given time)
As Laurence Lerner recently remarked, New Historicism can be summed up, not unfairly, as the doctrine that a poem is not for all time. All literary works, including the greatest, are embedded in history, their meaning wholly determined by contemporary pressures; the idea, so dear to Ben Jonson, that great art can over-arch history, can speak with its own authoritative voice to generations yet unborn, is chimerical (the product of unchecked imagination) Yet Bate is struck by the fact that Shakespeare seems genuinely able to use Ovid as a means of transcending his immediate historical situation.
The Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives was excited by the thought that beneath the fluid surface of things there lay an essential human nature It is an idea which we, in our time, have been taught, by a series of genuinely powerful arguments, to scorn none the less let us proceed
directly and without historical mediation to the myths of antiquity to explain sexual psychology
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