Review of Shakespeare’s Ovid and the Spectre of the Medieval

Shakespeare’s Ovid and the Spectre of the Medieval, by Lindsay Ann Reid. Studies in Renaissance Literature, vol. 36. Cambridge, U.K.: D. S. Brewer, 2018.  Pp. 267 + xiii.

Monographs and edited collections that explore the correspondences between early modern and ancient poets have proliferated over the last three decades. Ovid has been a favorite topic, often twinned with Shakespeare. The best studies avoid making insupportably grand claims about either author or the cultures that were alleged to have produced them and to have made them into the writers they became. Instead, studies that make numerous smaller observations in support of a credible and easily-digested governing idea tend to be more convincing and successful. Focus is essential because of the diversity of elements necessary in the process of research and writing.  Jonathan Bate, Colin Burrow, Heather James, Lynn Enterline, and Charles Martindale, for example, have exemplified these virtues in their work.

Less successful comparative critical productions have tended to present the same difficulties to their readers. The authors are often without training in ancient languages. Their familiarity with Ovid depends exclusively on which English prose translation they have consulted, not the poetry in its original form. Accordingly, the knowledge of the canon is narrow, usually confined to some parts of the Metamorphoses, though the early modern writers who comprise the purported subjects of these studies were just as familiar with the other compositions that comprised their mostly Erasmian schooling, the Amores, Ars amatoria, Heroides, Tristia, and even the Fasti. Hence,…