Shakespeare's Ovid: The Metamorphoses in the Plays and Poems and Thomas Heywood's Art of Love: The First Complete English Translation of Ovid's Ars Amatoria. (Reviews).

A. B. Taylor, Shakespeare's Ovid: The Metamorphoses in the Plays and Poems Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. xii + 219 pp. $54.95. ISBN: 0-521-77192-7.

M. L. Stapleton, ed., Thomas Heywood's Art of Love: The First Complete English Translation of Ovid's Ars Amatoria 

Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2000. xi + 173 pp. $44.50. ISBN: 0-472- 10913-8.

Shakespeare's Ovid convenes distinguished senior scholars as well as a few newer voices and serves as an appropriate capstone to a central critical tradition of interpreting Ovid's influence on Shakespeare's imagination. Due in large part to the generous editing practices of A. B. Taylor, the volume presents a coherent portrait of the elusive poet who inspired Francis Meres to describe Shakespeare as the Eliza- bethan Ovid. Consistency is no small feat: one might expect an anthology on two metamorphic poets to prove hopelessly (or productively, if one goes in for discontinuity) varied, even motley. As several authors appreciatively note, Taylor calls for serious consideration of the institutional contexts in which Ovid was likely to have been interpreted by Shakespeare's contemporaries in their schooldays and beyond. He similarly ensures that Shakespeare is placed in close contact with that strong minded translator, Arthur Golding, and the moralizing tradition associated with his name. The anthology unquestio nably profits from Taylor's efforts to place the contributors on speaking terms and reward the reader who wishes to consider the book's overall themes and methods.

Another strategy for securing common ground -- recurrence to an image of Ovid as a detached and witty ironist -- is in my view less persuasive. At one time accepted as a given, this ethical sketch has come under scrutiny by feminist classicists and social historians particularly if it is used (as is often the case) to dissociate Ovid from his darker psychological and political themes. For the critic of allusion, however, one's task is considerably simplified if playfulness, complexity, and ambiguity are located in the imitation and not the source. In the present volume, Shakespeare's adaptations of Ovidian materials are often praised for restoring transcendent, even magical properties to tales the urbane Ovid chose to de-mythify (5). In the political context of Rome's newly deified rulers, however, Ovid's knack for puncturing myth has a purpose as complex as any in Shakespeare.

The volume's first essay in fact argues convincingly for political reading of Elizabethan translations of Ovid. R. W. Maslen draws on pedagogical institutions, rhetorical tracts, and translations to sketch out ways in which the Metamorphoses was available to political interpretation in the sixteenth century; John Roe takes a complementary approach to two erotic poems, Hero and Leander and Venus and Adonis. Because these essays constitute a section called "The background to Shakespeare's Ovid," they appear to promise a commitment to cultural analyses by the anthology as a whole. However, the political Ovid largely disappears from the long middle section entitled "The Metamorphoses in the Plays and Poems." A notable exception is the exemplary essay by William C. Carroll, who reviews the performance and editorial histories of Two Gentlemen a/Verona to show how the play's directors and editors characteristically wish away its most troubling feature: Proteus' attempted rape of Sylvia and Valentine's friendly "offe r" of her to the repentant Proteus. Carroll proposes that Shakespeare draws on Ovid's tales of rape and Elyot's tale of Titus and Gisippus as points not of contrast but of analogy: "Proteus' rape and Valentine's offer have to be understood together, as paired, reflecting actions.. . Shakespeare in effect equates these two key transactional moments of a masculinist ideology of possession" (59). Also illuminating are A. B. Taylor's pages on Titus Andronicus' response to Golding's Calvinist translation of Ovid's.

The essays by Yves Peyre and Francois Laroque deserve mention for the depth and suggestiveness of their interpretations and methods. Focusing on the Player's speech in Hamlet, Peyre suggests that the entire play belongs "to the shifting world of the Metamorphoses rather than to the epic vision of the Aeneid' (126). By deft use of the figure of metamorphosis and Pierre Brunel's theory of mythic interpretation, he uncovers coherent patterns in what might appear as scattered, fragmentary allusions to Ovid. Peyre's sense of the radiating effects of myth on texts may be productively compared to Harry Berger Jr.'s work on the underground networks of language (rhizomes) that produce more complex meaning in Shakespeare than appears on the surface. Using a similar method, Laroque extends his earlier work on festive worlds by considering how the Actaeon myth traces patterns of communal fragmentation and renewal.

Less successful are essays falling into two overlapping camps: those that refuse to disclose the critical methods by which they interpret allusion and those that substitute Jonathan Bate for Ovid -- and theory -- as the chief source of critical engagement. Niall Rudd's venerable essay on Pyramus and Thisbe, reprinted with minor modifications, has the best of reasons for ignoring methodological concerns of recent years. Gordon Braden's essay on the ways in which Ovid's theme of immortality appears in love lyric seems willfully to unfold according to the author's own associative faculties. Pauline Kiernan, on the other hand, settles for a rather tame thesis, that the "poetic indecorums" in Venus and Adonis "are not instances of artistic failure, but deliberate techniques of impropriety used to meaningful effect" (87). Raphael Lyne does consider some theories of allusion governing interpretations of Prospero's famous adaptation of Medea's incantations, but has trouble negotiating strong critics (e.g., Bate, Char les Martindale and, more generally, Stephen Hinds) in short space. Bate's landmark study, Shakespeare and Ovid(1993), winds up all too often serving merely to license disagreements with his local interpretations. This tendency crops up in a number of essays but is especially pronounced in A. D. Nuttall's "The Winter's Tale: Ovid Transformed," which grounds its conventionally skeptical reading of Paulina's actions in reaction to Bate's riskier, magical view of her powers.

The volume concludes with two helpful overviews by John W. Velz and Charles Martindale. Velz provides an historical survey of Ovid criticism within Shakespeare studies; it is a piece to which we will refer our graduate students for its summary of pioneering studies by Root, Anders, Bush, Fripp, and Baldwin. Velz also presents a survey of more recent work, which, while useful as a starting place, pays insufficient attention to political readings of Ovid while stressing the importance of some other contributions rather more than I would. Martindale, the author of many studies of intertextuality from the classical world to the modern, rounds off the anthology with a characteristically shrewd and skeptical essay on methodological problems of interpreting allusion.

There is much to admire in Shakespeare's Ovid and much to debate. As a poet keenly interested in slippery rhetoric and dark themes, Ovid invites healthy skepticism about critics' ability to anchor him to one set of disciplines and not to others. To gain an Ovid as coherent as the one here presented, other "Ovids" have been left out or minimized, particularly the ones best known from political, feminist, and psychoanalytic studies of the poems. In this context it is perhaps noteworthy that only one contributor in thirteen is a woman and only one of the interpretive contributors, William C. Carroll, seems as compelled by theoretical questions as by historical and interpretive ones. Nonetheless, the best essays sum up and productively extend an eminent tradition of reading Ovid and provide a useful context for situating the methodologies and interests of newer voices in the field. It is a volume that should be read beside the excellent studies of, for example, Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh (1986), Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (1993), and Lynn Enterline, The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (2000).

M. L. Stapleton's edition of Heywood's Art of Love provides a useful if brief introduction, a handsome text, and helpful notes, which will satisfy scholars and aid students. This edition makes it possible to recommend an Elizabethan translation to students who wish to chase down the classical sources of the major poets on their syllabus; since the volume is attractively presented and the notes are accessible, these students may well find themselves chasing down yet more sources.