2 - Shakespeare's Ovid and Sly's Chaucer

Summary

As much as Chaucer was associated in the early modern imagination with Ovid, so too was Shakespeare. In Palladis Tamia of 1598, the earliest piece of literary criticism to definitively discuss the nascent oeuvre of what is now early modern England's best-known author, Francis Meres used the vocabulary of metempsychotic literary spectrality when he claimed ‘as the soule of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras: so the sweete wittie soule of Ovid lives in mellifluous and hony-tongued Shakespeare’. Though Meres's often-quoted contention that Ovid's spirit can be recognised in Shakespeare's ‘sugred’ works should be taken cum grano salis (after all, Shakespeare was hardly the only English author he compared to this same Roman precursor), even so, his sense of Shakespeare as a tangibly Ovidian writer is one that continues to be felt to this day.

Antiquity's ‘most capricious poet’, as he is called by As You Like It's Touchstone, Ovid has been regularly hailed by twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury critics as having been Shakespeare's favourite author. To provide just a cursory smattering of the many such examples that could be cited: Russ McDonald sees ‘the allusive verbal texture of [Shakespeare's] plays … everywhere informed by Ovid's fantastic, memorable tales’; Sean Keilen portrays Shakespeare as an author who ‘makes the Ovidian texture and inflection of his writing clear during every phase of his career’; Jonathan Bate estimates that ‘approximately 90 per cent’ of Shakespeare's mythological allusions might well have ‘come from Ovid and would usually have been thought of by mythologically literate playgoers as Ovidian’; and Judith Dundas, construing the early modern author's many ‘mythological allusions … not merely [as] the product and sign of his grammar school training but of his response to the poetic spirit of Ovid’, has proposed that ‘Shakespeare appropriated Ovid as no other poet has done’.