“Materia conveniente modis”: Early Modern Dramatic Adaptations of Ovid

This chapter takes up various modes of Ovidian adaptation. The poet and his poems operate not only as sources for later works but also as models for structure. The essay looks at the way that Jonson’s play about writing — Poetaster — uses Ovid as a character while also considering his poetic legacy by using a slight revision of Marlowe’s translation of Amores 1.15 to stand in for the Ovidian poetic corpus. Ovid works as both a source and a problem in the play. In Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale, Ovid is an important presence but more as a source of structure than of content. I argue that the way the play defers narrative has much to do with Ovidian techniques of narrative deferral that produce a desire to hear the deferred tale. In both cases, Ovid gets adapted in ways that go beyond retelling stories from the Metamorphoses.

Remnants of Virgil, Ovid, and Paul in Titus Andronicus

Employing Linda Hutcheon’s analogy between biological and cultural adaptation, this chapter analyzes how the survivors of the Roman-Gothic war in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus adapt figures and narratives of the survivor—or remnant—from Virgil, Ovid, and St. Paul as strategic models in the covert, post-war feud of the play’s action. Titus assumes Virgil’s model of the remnant as non-regenerative and stoic; Tamora, on the other hand, employs Ovid’s regenerative and vengeful model, and eventually converts Titus to it. Their violent conflict and absorption in their revenge plots form the conditions for the emergence of a different kind of remnant: the remaining Romans and Goths who, according to a Pauline model, form a new incorporated community. The formation of this community arguably speaks to the context of the Protestant Reformation in Shakespeare’s England, in which violent excisions were made in the name of a latter-day Pauline community.

Appropriating Ovid’s Tyrannical Raptures in Macbeth

In contrast to Titus Andronicus, Macbeth adapts few Ovidian sources; nonetheless, the play reveals how completely the mature Shakespeare appropriates Ovid’s poetics, especially the element of raptus, seizing and being seized. Macbeth himself is the body rapt, and raped, as he experiences the sublime terror of being swept up and violated by forces at the edge of human understanding. The tyrant is both the rapist and the raped, seized by passions he cannot, or will not, control, tortured in “restless ecstasy” that drives him to greater violations. Using the rhizome and assemblage of Deleuze and Guattari, and the hauntology of Derrida, this chapter sees Shakespeare, Ovid, and human culture as fragmentary records of violent appropriations and traumatized ghosts haunting past, present, and future. The uncanny, spectral experiences Maurizio Calbi finds in postmodern Shakespearean adaptations are thus intensifications of experiences Shakespeare found in Ovid and made central to his art.

Medea’s Afterlife: Encountering Ovid in The Tempest

Scholars continually return to Shakespeare’s debt to Ovid in order to draw new insight into the playwright’s work. However, the relationship between The Tempest and Ovid has received relatively little critical attention. In the play’s final act, Prospero delivers a powerful speech that is taken from the sorceress Medea’s incantation in Book 7 of Metamorphoses. With these two iterations of the speech in mind, this chapter explores how performativity and literary history intertwine in the play. This line of inquiry calls into question the distinctions that scholars have previously seen between Prospero and the witch Sycorax, as well as opens opportunities to explore the effects of casting a female lead as “Prospera” in Julie Taymor’s recent film adaption The Tempest (2010).

Ovid’s Ghosts: Lovesickness, Theatricality, and Ovidian Spectrality on the Early Modern English Stage

This chapter applies Maurizio Calbi’s concept of Shakespeare’s contemporary spectrality, based on Derridean “hauntology,” to Ovid in the early modern era. It explores Ovid as an icon of lovesickness and theatricality, with interconnections between these terms, in early modern representations of and debates on the theatrical experience itself. The chapter moves from the height of Ovidian theatre to its shadowy afterlife – focusing primarily on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Jonson’s Poetaster, and the obscure interregnum closet drama Ovids Ghost – to explore the uncanny returns of spectral Ovids in related discourses concerning metamorphic illusion and the “self-shattering effects of painful love.”

Introduction: Representing “Ovids” on the Early Modern English Stage

This introduction explains the overall critical framework of the collection and provides a brief overview of the book’s topics and goals. In so doing, it explores Ovid on the early modern stage; the interconnections between Ovid, the classical concept of imitatio, and contemporary adaptation theory; the relationship between classical reception studies and adaptation theory; the interplay between Ovid and Shakespeare adaptation/appropriation studies. Following this discussion, the introduction describes the organizational structure and rationale of the book and previews the chapters, noting how sections and chapters relate to each other.

Worse than Philomel, Worse than Actaeon: Hyperreal Ovid in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus

This chapter engages with various postmodern theories of adaptation (Douglas Lanier’s Shakespearean Rhizomatics in particular) in order to explore how Shakespeare reshaped his source material from Ovid’s Metamorphoses to construct the horrific body trauma of Titus Andronicus. Shifting the typical focus of adaptation theory from recent adaptations of “Shakespeare” to Shakespeare’s own adaptation of Ovid, this essay examines specific moments from both Titus Andronicus and the tales of Philomela and Actaeon in the Metamorphoses—especially in connection to the performance of the “unspeakable,” the “obscene,” and the “irreligious”—in order to better understand the early modern play, the classical poem, and the very act of adaptation itself.

“Truly, and very notably discharg’d”: The Metamorphosis of Pyramus and Thisbe and the Place of Appropriation on the Early Modern Stage

In the mid 1590s, Shakespeare began a trend when he appropriated Ovid’s tale of Pyramus and Thisbe in two different genres, the tragedy Romeo and Juliet and the comic performance by the rude mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream The latter was the more subversive act, transforming the source material into a satire on the amateurs’ unskillful remix of their text, by focusing on the asymmetry between the performers’ transformative ambition and their skills. This janus-faced use of Ovid marks a divergence of appropriative treatment that saw the tragic adaptations struggle to maintain popularity against the widespread enjoyment of Shakespeare’s “tragical mirth,” and implicates Shakespeare in debates about the place of fidelity in appropriation. Pyramus and Thisbe’s Ovidian devolution aligns Shakespeare’s appropriative work with current theories about rhizomatic adaptation, and recognizes the collaborative and transformative nature of remediation.

Power, Emotion, and Appropriation in Ovid’s Tristia and Shakespeare’s Henry V

This chapter analyzes a relatively weak allusion to Ovid – Shakespeare and Ovid’s shared use of natural metaphors for emotional states – to understand the operation of authority in early modern dramatic adaptation. Both Ovid’s Tristia and Henry V are deep examinations of the workings of state power that analyze human feeling in terms of natural metaphors associated with particular locales. This chapter compares the language of cruelty in Ovid’s Tristia to Henry’s rhetoric of power in Henry V,arguing that Shakespeare appropriates Ovidian metaphor to imagine the emotive operation of hegemonic power. This appropriation enables audiences to see cruelty and sympathy operating in the register of emotional experiences that are geographically defined and provokes a consideration of the politics of appropriation.

“Let Rome in Tiber melt”: Hermaphroditic Transformation in Antonius and Antony and Cleopatra

This essay uses Ovid’s tale of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus as a vehicle for considering the connections between the theme of gender fluidity and the practice of literary transformations in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and Mary Sidney Herbert’s translation of Robert Garnier’s Antonius. The characters in both versions demonstrate the desire for and resistance to transformation, presenting a worldview that parallels Hermaphroditus’s own contradictory hatred of his disempowering metamorphosis and his prayer for anyone who bathes in Salmacis’s fountain to be similarly changed. This contradictory interpretation of the union of opposites serves as a lens through which to understand both plays, which fluctuate between anxieties over female power and recognition of the loss of clear markers distinguishing men and women, Rome and Egypt, conqueror and conquered, original and imitation. The two plays finally reject notions of masculine rigidity in favor of a more flexible view of gender and artistic creativity.