Ovid and the Mature Tragedies: Metamorphosis in Othello and King Lear

Summary

The orthodox account of the relationship between Shakespeare and his favourite classical poet, Ovid, proposes that it was explicit early in his career when his schoolboy reading of the Metamorphoses was fresh in his mind (thus Titus Andronicus, Venus and Adonis, and Lucrece are his most overtly Ovidian works), implicit in the metamorphic art of the comedies (A Midsummer Night's Dream especially), and profoundly reawakened in the late romances. Put like this, there is an obvious gap which has occasioned surprisingly little critical attention: are we to suppose that an influence the importance of which was second to none early and late in Shakespeare's career was non-existent or dormant in the middle of it? This essay, which represents work in progress towards a full-scale revaluation of the question of Shakespeare and Ovid, uses Othello and King Lear as test cases in an attempt to read the mature tragedies in Ovidian terms.

One reason for the neglect of the tragedies' Ovidianism is the fact that the Metamorphoses tend to bring to mind the golden age, with its associations of the forest, the springtime, leisure, youth, and love. But Ovid described the age of iron too, and the language in which he does so may suggest to us the world of Shakespeare's tragedies.