Talking Books with M.L. Stapleton

M.L. Stapleton has used his classical education in service of a very interesting aspect of early modern English literary studies: the influence of Latin-to-English translations on the writers of the era. His first book only hints at this. Harmful Eloquence: Ovid’s Amores from Antiquity to Shakespeare looks at the afterlives of Ovid’s work, beginning with a good grounding in the Amores, especially the poet’s persona, then moves through time to understand ways that Ovid’s ideas and persona found new expression as fragments in monastic Latin literary culture with the troubadours, in Dante’s La Vita Nuova and Petrarch’s Rime, then finally in Shakespeare’s Dark Lady sonnets, suggesting that Shakespeare is an “heir to Ovid and his medieval imitators” (ix). Harmful Eloquence is an important but underknown work on Ovid’s use of persona, Ovid in European literature, and Shakespeare’s poetics. Stapleton calls intertextuality a “minor function of this book” (x). It soon became a major function of Stapleton’s work.

Fated Sky: The Femina Furens in Shakespeare is the only book Stapleton has written directly about Shakespeare. He argues that Shakespeare read John Studley’s Seneca His Tenne Tragedies, Translated into Englysh (1581) and used the various types of women found there to inform some of his female characters such as Helena in All’s Well that Ends Well, Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew, and Margaret in 2 & 3 Henry VI and Richard III.

Thomas Heywood’s Art of Love: The First Complete English Translation…