Introduction

Summary

Over the past three decades, a steady flow of scholarship has investigated the postclassical reception of Publius Ovidius Naso, the ancient Roman poet better known in Anglophone contexts as Ovid – a trend evinced, for example, by the 2014 appearance of the hefty Handbook to the Reception of Ovid edited by John F. Miller and Carole E. Newlands. The field continues only to expand, with the critical mass of relevant publications concentrating on the early modern period. The ever-growing body of work on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ovidiana demonstrates that this classical poet's hold on the early modern imagination was both ubiquitous and complex. Often associated with the lewd and/or subversive, Ovid was also indisputably a canonical figure whose writings were enshrined in the pan-European humanist educational curriculum. In short, he was early modernity's go-to source for Greco-Roman mythological narratives and the age's most lauded rhetorical model. ‘Ovidius Naso was the man’, as Shakespeare's Holofernes famously affirms in Love's Labour's Lost, ‘for the elegancy, facility, and golden cadence of poesy’. The late Elizabethan milieu, in particular, is widely recognised as a context in which the ‘Ovidian’ mode permeated literary discourse, conspicuously serving, as scholars such as Cora Fox and Daniel D. Moss have argued, as ‘a code for emotional expression’ and an ‘allusive language through which’ authors ‘competed with one another …, addressing readers, patrons, and audiences’ who were themselves ‘increasingly familiar with Ovidian materials and styles’.

Contemporary scholarship is largely in agreement with Robert Kilburn Root's century-old assessment that ‘the whole character of Shakespeare's mythology is essentially Ovidian’. Furthermore, it is peppered with assertions that ‘Shakespeare [was] profoundly inspired by [his] generation's revival of what they saw as a more “authentic” Ovid’ than that invoked by their vernacular precursors or that he ‘lived during a period in which ways of reading Ovid underwent radical transformation’. But what exactly do we mean when we identify particular instances of literary ‘Ovidianism’ in an early modern English context? What counts as ‘Ovidian’?