Shakespeare's Ovid and the Spectre of the Medieval by Lindsay Ann Reid (review)

Scholarly efforts to rethink the once sacrosanct period-divide between late medieval and early modern English culture have been under way for quite some time now, and the Studies in Renaissance Literature series has made several important contributions to these exertions. Lindsay Ann Reid's Shakespeare's Ovid and the Spectre of the Medieval is the latest— exhibiting the perspicacity, nuance, and scope that we have come to expect from the series.

The strength of this study is its dense and challenging close readings of ancient, medieval, and early modern texts. Reid selects "deliberately unexpected" (49) Shakespeare plays, by which she means texts that engage with Ovid, Chaucer, or Gower other than Titus Andronicus, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Troilus and Cressida, Pericles, and The Two Noble Kinsmen. Chapter 2 argues that the Ovidian influences on The Taming of the Shrew and Cymbeline flow through the medieval conduit of Chaucer's Book of the Duchess. In Chapter 3, Reid traces the affective experiences of the character Julia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona back to the classical tales of Ariadne, yet simultaneously demonstrates the importance of their decidedly un-Ovidian postclassical transformations for Shakespeare. Chapter 4's claim, that Shakespeare's use of the classical alba, or dawn-song, is inflected through Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, is convincingly presented, though I was never sure why the term "inverse alba" and not "nocturne" was used to describe moments such as Juliet's opening monologue in Romeo and Juliet, 3.2. Chapter 5 is, for me, the most fascinating and persuasive. Here, Reid makes the case that Gower's representation of Narcissus in the Confessio Amantis had a substantial influence on English literature for the following two centuries, including on Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. Uniquely, Gower styles a "heteronormative, cognitively erroneous Narcissus who falls in love with a female illusion" (172), and Shakespeare's comedy, with its multifaceted exploration of the fluidity of identity and gender performed by cross-dressed male actors, is a celebration of these "spectral medieval traditions" (198) par excellence.

Bookending these readings are two chapters featuring specific early modern material texts: the curious collection of Ovidian tales "penn'd after the ancient manner of writing in England" entitled Chaucer's Ghoast (1672), and Bodleian Library, MS Autogr. F.1, once widely believed to have been Shakespeare's personal copy of the Metamorphoses. Readers of SAC may be particularly interested in Chapter 1's survey of the curious amalgamations of Ovid, Chaucer, and Gower in Chaucer's Ghoast, and particularly the manner in which, as Reid shows, it recalls Speght's efforts to canonize Chaucer by conflating his epoch with classical Antiquity.

And yet, for all of the fascinating appeal of this quirky seventeenth-century text, I wish that Reid had chosen a different metaphor to describe the influence of Chaucer and Gower on Shakespeare than that of ghostly hauntings. The danger, as I see it, is that it risks perpetuating the view that the medieval is dead on arrival in Renaissance culture rather than vital and efficacious. It surrenders too much authority to the early modern poet. I hasten to state that Reid does not fall prey to this view; indeed, every chapter succeeds in showing that this is not the case. But, once she has borrowed the metaphor of the medieval specter from Chaucer's Ghoast, I do think that she misses an opportunity to engage with the influential work of a scholar who, in my opinion, does tend to value Shakespeare at the expense of his medieval antecedents. Shakespeare, according to Stephen Greenblatt, was haunted by the empty simulacra of medieval culture and liturgy from which his genius forged vigorous new dramatic forms, and a more direct confrontation with this still influential account would have been most welcome.

Despite Reid's explicit intention to eschew plays with obvious indebtedness to Ovid, Chaucer, or...