Lindsay Ann Reid's second monograph emphasizes early modern continuities with medieval traditions, flouting the periods’ boundaries while furthering her questioning of Ovidian reception. To do so, she selects a few “Shakespearean moments,” classified in contemporary scholarship as being “Ovidian,” and traces where “Ovidianism [is] intersecting with Chaucerianism and Gowerism in constellation” (4).
Meticulously well-documented, Reid's approach is twofold: in order to look for “spectral presence” of a “pervasive medievalism” in Shakespeare, she first assesses what counts as Ovidian, which sets her book immediately in conversation with a vast range of up-to-date literary criticism (as there is a host of scholarship on the postclassical reception of Publius Ovidius Naso in Shakespeare). Reid draws from these studies to establish her corpus of references. Second, as she is concerned with “trans-historical, polyvocal and multilingual conglomerate of intertexts that coalesce to form an Ovidian allusion in Shakespeare” (4), Reid adds a web of postclassical, vernacular versions of classical Ovid that cannot be separated from Shakespeare's classical knowledge and that color it.
The specter metaphor structures such Ovidian, Chaucerian, and Gowerian “constellations,” delving into what A. E. B. Coldiron calls “the mediated medieval” (Medieval Shakespeare [2013]). Reid toys with the Derridean notion of specter (Spectres of Marx [1993]) to examine how literary tradition and genesis fail to comply to chronology and offer instead “temporal disjointure,” a “non-present present” (36). In so doing, she deftly shows that she is not merely expanding the literary overlaps between Chaucer and Shakespeare, which has been partly studied by critics (mainly in relation to Troilus and Cressida, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and A Midsummer Night's Dream), but reconfiguring the content of this legacy to include Gower's intertextual presence—hardly ever explored, except in relation to Pericles. If Reid refers to the “intermediary medieval vernacular precedents” (i.e., Chaucer and Gower) as “phantom texts” of Ovid (38), she effectively documents their presence as fatherly precursors, piecing out medieval elements through a cumulative effect of contextual and internal evidence.
The “phantomatic recomposition” (38) in Shakespeare of the discontinuous literary imagination about Ovid and mediating postclassical authors in “constellation” is explored through case studies of The Taming of the Shrew (chapter 2), The Two Gentlemen of Verona (chapter 3), The Rape of Lucrece and Romeo and Juliet (chapter 4), and Twelfth Night (chapter 5), as well as the anonymous Chaucer's Ghoast (chapter 1) and an Aldine edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses (1502), once believed to be Shakespeare's own Latin copy of Ovid (afterword).
A few examples stand out to illustrate Reid's argument. Although The Taming of the Shrew is read by many as bearing the traces of Shakespeare's humanist training, she suggests a structural reading of the play by considering the induction as a form of medieval dream vision. Though the play does not explicitly refer to Chaucer's Book of the Duchess, she extends an argument made for A Midsummer Night's Dream, asserting that Taming resorts to the same type of internal dispositio, blurring fantasy and reality. Chapter 3 unpacks the multilayered expression “to passion like Ariadne” (Two Gentlemen of Verona 4.4.158–61) to trace how Shakespeare's widely acknowledged reference to Ovid's Heroides 10 is tinged by the medieval reception of Theseus as a perjurer in Chaucer's Anelida and Arcite, “The Knight's Tale,” and Legenda Adriane de Athenes, as well as in Gower's Confessio Amantis (book 5). Reid insists on the importance of the “sister-swap” (101), showing how the medieval Phaedra, sister and rival to Ariadne, offers a structural motif that weaves its way into the play and reveals an “Ovidian lineage . . . quite un-Ovidian” (110), thus supplementing Goran Stanivukovic's “Ovid and the Styles of Adaptation in The Two Gentlemen of Verona” (Ovid and Adaptation [2020]).
As Reid unravels the dynamics of literary resurrection in the riddle of Chaucer's Ghoast (chapter 1), she exposes the sham of the title (spoiler alert!): the ghost that emerges is Gower's in Confessio Amantis (22n32; annex 1). Through precise historicizing, Reid sustains a convincing reappraisal of Gower's early modern reception. By mixing well-established references with less trodden grounds—such as Ovide Moralisé, William Caxton, and medieval romances—Reid expands the picture of a mediated Ovid that haunts Shakespeare's poetic imagination as much as his classical readings.
