Review of A. B. Taylor (ed.) Shakespeare's Ovid: The Metamorphoses in the
plays and poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). ISBN 0-521-77192-7
As John W. Velz reminds us here, "80 per cent of Shakespeare's mythological
allusions are from Ovid" and the remainder almost all from Virgil (p. 181), so the Metamorphoses
necessarily looms large in thinking about Shakespeare's use of myths. Niall Rudd suggests
that Flute-as-Thisbe's miscalling Ninus's tomb "Ninny's tomb" (A Midsummer
Night's Dream 3.1.91) was a joke most likely prompted by the dramatist's reading of
Ovid's Latin ("ad busta Nini"), not Arthur Golding's English
translation (p. 116). On the other hand, Golding's phrasing of Pyramus and Thisbe's plan
"To steale out of their fathers house" and meet "without the towne"
resurfaces in Lysander's proposal to Hermia: "Steal forth thy father's house" to
meet "a league without the town" (1.1.164-5); in Shakespeare's mind the farcical
lovers were connected to the serious ones. Many such delightful insights are to be found
here.
Other contributors are concerned with method. A. D. Nuttall objects to the fashionable
formalism which treats as ironic all dramatic self-reflexivity, as when Paulina,
Pygmalion-like, apparently brings a statue to life in The Winter's Tale
(p. 114-7) while Charles Martindale addresses our common assumption that the context of a
passage alluded to or imitated is relevant to our understanding of the allusion or
imitation. We should not assume this: the Elizabethans liked commonplace books which
decontextualized and recontextualized favourite passages, categorizing thematically into
such groups as 'passages about sleep' (p. 201). These fine essays of classical/Renaissance
scholarship engage with and further the work of Jonathan Bate's Shakespeare and Ovid
(1993). Like Sarah Annes Brown's The Metamorphosis of Ovid (1999) this book makes
considerable demands of the reader and repays them handsomely. Anyone with an interest in
Shakespeare's poetical debts would benefit from this book, but advanced undergraduate and
postgraduate readers and their teachers will get the most from its riches.
Gabriel Egan
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Gabriel
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