Time for a transition from posts related to Shakespeare’s England to ancient Greece before the Trojan war. Like Shakespeare who leaned on the Roman poet Ovid, I use his Metamorphoses as a springboard. Related blogs can be found on my new site, Gender and Greek Myth, link below.
Though writing in Latin in 8 CE, the Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso gave us the first collection of myths of the ancient Greeks. At the Stratford Grammar School Will Shakespeare read Ovid in Latin and later in Arthur Golding’s 1567 English translation. The stories and their psychological acuity inspired him from his early play Titus Andronicus, with its terrifying depiction of revenge cannibalism derived from Ovid’s tale of Philomela, Procne, and Tereus, to his late plays The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest.
As with Titus, Shakespeare rarely retells a tale from Ovid directly, exceptions being his poem ‘Venus and Adonis,’ ten times longer than Ovid’s version, and his comic send-up of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Plots, imagery, references and themes, however, are ubiquitous. Bottom’s metamorphosis into an ass resembles Midas’ at the end of that tale and Imogen’s reading a copy of the Metamorphoses in Cymbeline are two of the countless examples.
Readers today have a shelf of translations to choose from, the latest, Stephanie McCarter’s, uses straightforward English to describe the rapes and attempted rapes in the Metamorphoses. Daniel Mendelsohn’s review in the New Yorker also mentions Ovid’s early poems about the arts of love, scandalous in their own time, and the poet’s eventual banishment by the puritanical Augustus Caesar to remote Tomis for slightly obscure reasons. My favorite recent translation, however, is by Charles Martin, 2004.
The 15 books of the Metamorphoses range from the creation to the apotheosis of Julius Caesar, ending with Ovid’s prophecy that his works will bring him immortality. He’s best known for its dramatic tales of passion and their sometimes shocking outcomes, wittily told. Ovid collected them from a variety of Greek sources, choosing from various versions. In the Iliad and Odyssey, Homer refers to the gods as if everyone knows about them. They would have, since he wrote his epics after some 400 years after the Trojan war. Until his works, descriptions of its gods and heroes had been passed along orally. Hesiod, roughly Homer’s contemporary, describes the birth of the gods in his Theogony.
But Ovid, writing in Latin early in the first century C.E., is the master story teller, including some 250 tales in the Metamorphoses. Shakespeare, like writers before and since, relied on these poems. An excellent study of what he gained and made use of: Jonathan Bate’s Shakespeare and Ovid, Clarendon, 1993.
In a sense, what Shakespeare does with Ovid, the Roman poet did with Greek stories: continuity with change. That’s the theme of Pythagoras’ teachings in Book 15 of the Metamorphoses: nothing is destroyed but changes into new forms. (Also, incidentally, this contributes to Pythagoras’ advocacy of vegetarianism. To him the primal sin is flesh eating flesh, when other food abounds. Spirit isn’t destroyed by death. It ‘wanders wherever it wishes to . . . living with whatever body it chooses . . . from feral to human and then back again.’ Charles Martin, 526.) You don’t want to eat your grandmother.
The sixth century B.C. philosopher Heraclitus said no one steps into the same river twice: the person has changed and the river has changed. Every story Ovid tells involves transformation, with humans becoming animals, flowers, rocks. By the end of the Metamorphoses the transformations are metaphysical, both Julius Caesar and he himself becoming stars.
My next novel focuses on one of Ovid’s metamorphoses so short and powerful that I’ve puzzled over it for years. To quote Bate, his stories ‘initiate the reader into a world of unorthodox swervings of gender and generation.’ These move in a different direction from Shakespeare’s plays of disguise and gender fluidity.
This is the last post on ‘Sex and Gender in Shakespeare’s England’ for the time being. The new posts can be found on genderandgreekmyth.com.