Description
Book SynopsisA study of how the use of Ovid in Middle English texts affected Shakespeare's treatment of the poet. The debt owed by Shakespeare to Ovid is a major and important topic in scholarship. This book offers a fresh approach to the subject, in aiming to account for the Middle English literary lenses through which Shakespeare and his contemporaries often approached Greco-Roman mythology. Drawing its principal examples from The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet, Lucrece, and Twelfth Night, it reinvestigates a selection of moments in Shakespeare's works that have been widely identified in previous criticism as "Ovidian", scrutinising their literary alchemy with an eye to uncovering how ostensibly classical references may be haunted by the under-acknowledged, spectral presences of medieval intertexts and traditions. Its central concern is the mutual hauntings of Ovid, Geoffrey Chaucer, and John Gower in the early modern literary imagination; it demonstrates that "Ovidian" allusions to mythological figures such as Ariadne, Philomela, or Narcissus in Shakespeare's dramatic and poetic works were sometimes simultaneously mediated by the hermeneutic and affective legacies of earlier vernacular texts,including The Legend of Good Women, Troilus and Criseyde, and the Confessio Amantis. LINDSAY ANN REID is a Lecturer in English at the National University of Ireland, Galway.
Trade ReviewShakespeare and Ovid are a familiar coupling; so too, to medievalists, are Ovid and the medieval; and the pairing of Shakespeare and the medieval is making its presence increasingly felt. * TRANSLATION AND LITERATURE *
Scholarly efforts to rethink the once sacrosanct period-divide between late medieval and early modern English culture have been under way for quite some time now, and the Studies in Renaissance Literature series has made several important contributions to these exertions. Lindsay Ann Reid's Shakespeare's Ovid and the Spectre of the Medieval is the latest-exhibiting the perspicacity, nuance, and scope that we have come to expect from the series. The strength of this study is its dense and challenging close readings of ancient, medieval, and early modern texts. * STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER *
Shakespeare's Ovid and the Spectre of the Medieval is a courageous book rectifying the influential oversights by celebrated critics of a canonical writer. With thorough research and probing insights, Reid corrects a distorted understanding of the culture and traditions informing early modern literature, and of Shakespeare himself. * PARERGON *
Table of ContentsIntroduction Chaucer's Ghoast, Ovid's 'Pleasant Fables', and the Spectre of Gower Shakespeare's Ovid and Sly's Chaucer Theseus and Ariadne [and her Sister] Philomela and the Dread of Dawn The Cross-Dressed Narcissus Afterword Appendix 1: The Gowerian Riddles of Chaucer's Ghoast Appendix 2: Ariadne's Desertion in Bulleins Bulwarke of Defence Bibliography
