Ovid And The Elizabethans

Elizabethan English culture is saturated with tales and figures from Ovid s Metamorphoses. While most of these narratives interrogate metamorphosis and transformation, many tales - such as those of Philomela, Hecuba, or Orpheus - also highlight heightened states of emotion, especially in powerless or seemingly powerless characters. When these tales are translated and retold in the new cultural context of Renaissance England, a distinct politics of Ovidian emotion emerges. Through intertextual readings in diverse cultural contexts, Ovid and the Politics of Emotion in Elizabethan England reveals the ways these representations helped redefine emotions and the political efficacy of emotional expression in sixteenth-century England.

A study of how the use of Ovid in Middle English texts affected Shakespeare's treatment of the poet.

Excerpt from Some Elizabethan Opinions of the Poetry and Character of Ovid: A Dissertation Widely scattered and radically differing expressions of opin ion with regard to the personality and works of Ovid appear in England from Sir Thomas Elyot's The Gavernaur (1531) to Dry den's Preface to the Fables With very general agreement that the poems often give occasion for ofi'ense to the moral sense, and in some instances with extremely plain speaking upon this matter, writers commonly see one of two possibilities. Some would condemn the poems to what they regarded as well-merited Oblivion, while others would have recourse to what they considered a sort of Higher Criticism. They would separate the good from the evil in the poems, and ignoring or forgetting the latter, make the utmost profit out of the good. On their favorite analogy of the bee, which extracts honey from even the most poisonous plants, they would, moreover, find some profit in the evil itself. The latter very natu rally, therefore, attach peculiar importance to the manner of read ing or interpretation. Moralization, based on the assumed under lying allegory, Or in some cases very numerous allegories, is the alchemy with which they would transmute the baser metal. What appears to the hasty reader or to the untrained mind as a filthy fable must in this view be moralized in its kind; whereupon it yields matter both pleasant and profitable, thereby justifying the oft-quoted Horatian maxim. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

A comprehensive examination of Shakespeare's use of Ovid's epic poem, Metamorphoses.

This book explores how Ovid, as the poet-philosopher of the liberty of speech, galvanized poetic innovation in English Renaissance poetry.