Abstract
The influence of Ovid on early modern English literature is so overwhelming and commented upon that little more can be said about it. The poet of love and mutability appealed to English poets’ imagination and his stories were an inexhaustible resource for Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists. Writers were attracted by the pagan myth of metamorphosis, the rhetoric of the body, love and intimacy, betrayal and desertion, friendship, and exile.1 Ovid influenced the Renaissance theories of imitation produced in Elizabethan times and the fashion for the use of classical allusions in poetry and drama made Ovid, next to Virgil and Horace, one of the most quoted or alluded to classical poets in early modern English literature. In addition, Ovid’s laments and his elegiac descriptions of the land and people at the Pontus Euxinus in Tristia and Ex Ponto transformed him into an authority on banishment, alienation, and ethnic barbarism of nations at the margins of the known Roman world.2 We all bear in mind, however, the caveat suggested by Peter White and other classical scholars, namely that “Ovid” is a fictionalized poetic persona and the name “refers to a figment of his poems.”3 The carbon copy that Ovid created in the Elizabethans’ and Jacobeans’ imaginary regarding the cold and inhospitable land and the barbarous inhabitants living at the limits of the civilized world came to be assimilated to the representation most people in early modern England had about the Western coast of the Black Sea.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Among the studies concerning Ovid’s influence on early modern English literature that I have found most useful are Leonard Barkan’s impressive study on the Renaissance Ovid, The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986); the wide-ranging collection of essays edited by Charles Martindale and A. B. Taylor, Shakespeare and the Classics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)
Sarah Annes Brown, The Metamorphosis of Ovid from Chaucer to Ted Hughes (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999).
Concerning Ovid’s exilic poetry, I have considered Jan Felix Gaertner, “Ovid and the ‘Poetics of Exile’: How Exilic Is Ovid’s Exile Poetry?” in Writing Exile: The Discourse of Displacement in Greco-Roman Antiquity and Beyond, ed. Jan Felix Gaertner (Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2007), 155–72. Gaertner focuses on the two collections of literary epistles centered on the experience of the poet’s exile and observes that Ovid “adopts a generally more colloquial and prosaic style in the Tristia and the Epistulae ex Ponto” (169). This might explain, I believe, the recurrent references to these poetic works in later sixteenth-century English geography and travel narratives, apart from the implicit assumption transmitted throughout the ages that Ovid was the eternal and symbolic traveler and exiled poet.
Peter White, “Ovid and the Augustan Milieu,” in Brill’s Companion to Ovid, ed. Barbara Weiden Boyd (Leiden, Boston, Köln: Brill, 2002), 1–25, 2.
John Richmond, “Manuscript Traditions and the Transmission of Ovid’s Works,” in Brill’s Companion to Ovid, ed. Barbara Weiden Boyd (Leiden, Boston, Köln: Brill, 2002), 443–82, 443.
Arthur F. Kinney, “Revisiting The Tempest,” in The Tempest: Critical Essays, ed. Patrick M. Murphy (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 277–92, 290.
Gareth Williams, “Ovid’s Exilic Poetry: Worlds Apart,” in Brill’s Companion to Ovid, ed. Barbara Weiden Boyd (Leiden, Boston, Köln: Brill, 2002), 337–81, 340.
Colin Burrow, “Ovid,” in Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 93–132, 93.
Discussing Shakespeare’s myths derived from Ovid, Charles and Michelle Martindale, in Shakespeare and the Uses of Antiquity: An Introductory Essay, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1994), observe the Latin poet’s popularity at the most prolific time of Shakespeare’s creation, noting that “in the 1590s there was a general vogue for Ovidian narrative, which waned thereafter” (82). Similarly, Jessica Wolfe discusses “Shakespeare’s Ovidianism”—Ovid’s influences on Shakespeare—but only the themes of change from the Metamorphoses and Ovid’s love poetry are found to figure highly among the favorite allusions; there is no mention of influences from Tristia and Ex-Ponto, which nevertheless exist in Shakespeare.
See Jessica Wolfe, “Classics,” in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 519–35, esp. 524–28 and 529–32, about Shakespearean characters reading Ovid.
Gordon Braden, in The Classics and English Renaissance Poetry: Three Case Studies (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978), devotes an entire chapter (1–54) to Golding’s translation of Ovid, concluding that Golding’s “diffuse obliquity before the text” is caused by the fact that he was facing the reputable Latin poet; confronted with Ovid’s text, the translator displayed “not sophisticated detachment but a deep, naïve intimidation before its content and prestige” (54).
See R. W. Maslen, “Myths Exploited: The Metamorphoses of Ovid in Early Elizabethan England,” in Shakespeare’s Ovid: The Metamorphoses in the Plays and Poems, ed. A. B. Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 15–30; in reviewing the sixteenth-century readings and interpretations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Maslen points out “the duplicitous nature of Ovid’s poem” (17) and shows that the interpretations of Shakespeare’s Elizabethan predecessors were more “sophisticated” and “politically engaged” (28) than we are willing to concede. In Translations from the Classics into English from Caxton to Chapman: 1477–1620 (New York: Octagon Books, 1967), Henry Burrowes Lathrop notes that “Ovid was an author in whom his readers took a more intimate delight than Vergil” (125) and “Shakespeare’s abundant classical mythology practically all comes from Ovid, who contributes to give Shakespeare’s writing its peculiar atmosphere of romance” (125). Indeed, both political engagement and dramatic uses of Ovidian mythology were part of the early modern writers’ highly theatrical awareness that the power of words is changed by the nature of the speaker/writer and by the audience’s/readers’ attitude to that speaker/writer.
Raphael Lyne, Ovid’s Changing Worlds: English Metamorphoses, 1567–1632 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 239.
Explaining the associative and eclectic reading practices of the Elizabethans, Robert S. Miola, in Shakespeare’s Reading (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), notes the “literary culture of quotation and allusion” (3), especially from the classics and the Bible, fostered by the emphasis on memorization in Elizabethan schools.
Mary Ellen Lamb and Valerie Wayne, “Introduction: Into the Forest,” Staging Early Modern Romance: Prose Fiction, Dramatic Romance, and Shakespeare, edited by Mary Ellen Lamb and Valerie Wayne (New York and London: Routledge, 2009), 1–20, 2.
In writing about Spenser’s representations of war machines in Book v of The Taerie Queene, including Talus, Jessica Wolfe, in Humanism, Machinery, and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), mentions among the classical ancestors of Spenser’s Talus the episode about Daedalus’s nephew from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, who “patrols the boundary between nature and artifice” (230). This is only one of the more than a few examples of the Spenserian reverberation of Ovid, which tells us much about the use of Ovid as an authority on early modern science and invention.
Jan Felix Gaertner, Introduction to Ovid, Epistulae Ex Ponto, Book 1, ed. Jan Felix Gaertner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 1–44, 6.
Copyright information
© 2015 Monica Matei-Chesnoiu
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Matei-Chesnoiu, M. (2015). Ovid, Pontus Euxinus, and Geographic Imagination. In: Geoparsing Early Modern English Drama. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137469410_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137469410_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-50253-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-46941-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)