Too long have critics considered the inventiveness of English poetry within the framework of a draconian culture of censorship. In Ovid and the Liberty of Speech in Shakespeare's England, Heather James makes a strong case for reading Ovid's erotic elegies, Amores, as moral and political, “a galvanizing force” (1), and “a kernel of Republican values” (185). Her argument, supported by a central critical concept—bold, open, frank speech (parrhesia in Greek, licentia in Latin)—traces elegiac Ovidianism in Renaissance poetry. She convincingly articulates Ovid's licentia (seen as morally reprehensible by Puritans) with Renaissance poets’ plea for moral liberty (or licentia), showing how the ways in which Ovid tested the shifting definitions of licentia are constantly replayed in the Renaissance. James also explores links between parrhesia and poetic license, an ambiguous term that at first was concerned with Horatian norms and poetic decorum and eventually became defined as a form of voluntary self-censorship (147–52).
Ovidian intertextuality is conducive to parrhesia: in his erotic elegies, Ovid notoriously illustrates the witty use of indecorum. When politically banished to Tomis, near the Black Sea, he repeatedly gave mythological victims and dissidents a voice when they were reduced to silence by brutal coercion or arbitrary rules. His political exile—perhaps caused by Augustus's wrath after his affair with Julia—serves to redefine the notion of openness when opposed to censorship: the text is not explicit (palam), but it is open (aperte) to interpretation, allowing readers to search for meaning, even if veiled in allegory. James describes Renaissance “poetry as a forum in which the boldness (if not the openness) of speech may survive and flourish even in forbidding times” (1). She defends the engagement of literary creation as a parrhesiastic creative gesture, not (necessarily) linked to topical reading but to political philosophy. Over five chapters, James explores how poetry is “a new space for thinking about the liberty of speech in the domain of fiction” (5), offering moments of Ovidian enargia that form bold lines of ruptures.
In chapter 1, “Flower Power: Political Discontent in Spenser's Flowerbeds,” James plays on Edmund Spenser's poetic copia, often dismissed as sycophantic, here amusingly paired with Allen Ginsberg's flower power. Broadening Syrithe Pugh's approach about Fasti (Spenser and Ovid [2005], 12–41), James adds other material, like Virgils Gnat (a translation of a juvenile poem by Vergil treated as an Ovidian complaint) to read across the Spenserian canon for unexpected discoveries on well-trodden grounds. For example, she concludes that the encomiastic instrumentality of The Aprill Eclogue needs to be set aside to consider “Spenser's narcissism” (23) in “a deictic moment of threshold” (34). Spenser's floral creativity weaves a dialectic between silence and eloquence, inciting the reader “to get lost in the act of reading” (38), transforming loss of parrhesia into the reader's silent act of interpretation.
In chapter 2, “Loving Ovid: Marlowe and the Liberty of Erotic Elegy,” James picks up where M. L. Stapleton leaves off in Marlowe's Ovid (2014). Christopher Marlowe's philosophical reception of Ovid as a translator, using Niger's Latin glosses (1543–1550), illuminates how All Ovids Elegies (1595), in the light of Ovid's Tristia 2, offers game playing as a structuring metaphor, demonstrating the productive function of aesthetic indecorum, an example of what Michel Foucault identifies as parrhesiastic games. Ovid's erotic elegies, his “wanton toys” (3.15.4), use poetic license as weapons for readers to use in their ideological battles—militat omnis amant (“all lovers war,” 1.9.1) and the elegies become a “training ground in the relationship of citizens, subjects with rules, norms and orthodoxies” (60) throughout Marlowe's canon. In chapter 3, “Shakespeare's Juliet: The Ovidian Girlhood of the Boy Actor,” James intriguingly poses Juliet as heir to the docta puella in Roman elegies. If the licentia of her speech may reflect a disposition to amorous licentiousness (according to Quintilian), it can also argue for her overturning of “traditions governing the language of love, family and social relations” (104). When Juliet, a transgressing daughter, challenges fatherly authority at her window and in the Capulet's vault, she momentarily “shakes loose some of the mortar holding together the order of patriarchal rule” (129). Thus, Shakespeare's expansion of Juliet's part in 3.2 (in Quarto 2) achieves the same type of bold resistance to the infamous 1599 Bishops’ Ban against Ovidian poetry as does Ben Jonson's Poetaster (1601) when he scripts Marlowe's translation of Amores 1 to be read onstage by Ovid in an early scene of his vitriolic comedy. James presents a second-generation Augustan poet in chapter 4, “In Pursuit of Change: The Metamorphoses in Midsummer Night's Dream,” and associates “the pursuit of change” with Ovidian iconoclastic practice meant to free theatrical energies. In chapter 5, “The Trial of Ovid: Jonson's Defense of Poetic Liberty,” James points out how Ovid was sidelined in Jonson's contemporary criticism even as Jonson styled himself an Ovidian. James precisely foregrounds how “political critique takes place in forms of speech that reveal and partly conceal their audacity through . . . encryption” (204) in Poetaster by unpacking Jonson's wealth of allusions to the Roman poet, using marginal and interlineal notes in his copy of Martial's epigrams [1619, ed. Peter Schrjiver]—placing him on the side of Joseph Justus Scaliger's defense of Ovid in Confutatio Fabulae Burdonum (1608). The strategic use of quotation marks for gnomic sentences in Poetaster's successive editions (Quarto 2, 1602 and Folio 1, 1616) contextualizes the use of Marlowe's prohibited translation of Ovid's Amores 1.15, pointing to it as “a maxim that reflects on the fate of Ovid, Marlowe and their censored words” (216). These sentences “shuttle between the past and present in a conscientious effort to arrive at truth” (218), suggesting how Jonson uses Ovid's denunciation of imperial trespass on the Roman private space for more contemporary condemnations.
In an epilogue, “Ovid in the Hands of Women,” James explores Milton's bolder speaker on the liberties, Eve in Paradise Lost (1667–1672), and, arrestingly, Anne Wharton's Julia in the unpublished Love's Martyr, or Witt above Crowns. Wharton stages Ovid's banishment from Julia's viewpoint, dramatizing the lovers’ impossible love; Ovid's numerous asides unveil how he only acts as a libertine to shield his love from the jealousies at court. Ultimately, before suicide, Julia claims “my soul . . . will reign in Ovids breast”; such echo to Ovid's closing formula in Metamorphoses about his “better part” being remembered by readers shows that Wharton fulfills what mattered to Ovid: the ability for readers to look to the past for “the energy of its liberating, unchained forms” (4), despite repeated moments of self-silencing. I strongly recommend James's deeply literary contribution to reading Ovid's classical parrhesiastic games.
