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

Shakespeare's Ovid and the Spectre of the Medieval follows a recent critical trend studying how medieval literature shaped early modern texts. Lindsay Ann Reid adds to the growing scholarship, arguing that Shakepeare's Ovidian allusions originate from medieval retellings of mythological texts. Her thesis challenges popular misconceptions that Shakespeare engaged directly with Ovid.

Reid focuses on Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower as Shakespeare's main medieval Ovidian influences. Central to Reid's argument is how the early modern period viewed the popular medieval scribes. In her analysis of Chaucer's Ghost (1672), Reid discovers in the text's medieval retelling of Ovid's fables not only Chaucer's work but Gower's. The reference, on Chaucer's Ghost's title page, to medieval writers as ancient enables Reid to argue convincingly that, to the early modern reader, Chaucer's and Gower's adaptations of Ovid became an Ovidian fusion of mythological antiquity.

As Reid's study unfolds, she reveals that the most influential critical readings of Shakespeare build on the misconstrued importance of early modern England's 'humanist educational system' intersecting with the Greek and Latin Ovid (p. 41). She broaches the question of Shakespeare's authorship with T. W. Baldwin's assertion—in his famous work William Shakespeare's Small Latine & Lesse Greeke (University of Illinois Press, 1944)—that Shakespeare did not know much Greek or Latin. Therefore, credibly, Shakespeare did not need to read the classics directly.

Reid tests her thesis on unequivocal Ovidian moments in Shakespeare's Elizabethan texts. In The Taming of the Shrew's induction, the erotic Ovidian images entertaining Christopher Sly are read by Reid through ekphrastic poetry. She then links Shakespeare's ekphrasis with Chaucer's dream vision The Book of the Duchess. Despite numerous mentions to dreams in Sly's induction, Reid notes the subject has rarely been examined. With Taming's ekphrastic Ovidian imagery and semantic leaning towards dreams, Reid argues that the Chaucerian dreamer and his vision of Ovidian images is the Ovid that influenced Shakespeare.

The Two Gentlemen of Verona provides another incontestable Ovidian allusion to Heroides 10 through the tale of Ariadne. The critical problem of associating Shakespeare's play directly to Ovid's letters means disregarding a literary history of spin-doctoring Ariadne's tale. The story of Ovid's lovesick Ariadne who has been mysteriously abandoned by her lover Theseus and pines for his return is transformed by Gower and Chaucer. Reid notes that the additional medieval narrative explaining Ariadne's abandonment starts a tradition for a traitorous Theseus and a wicked Phaedra who steals her sister's lover. In Act 4, Scene 4 of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Julia-as-Sebastian's understanding of 'to passion like Ariadne' (p. 76) is further complicated through Shakespeare using the word 'passion' to mean both deep feeling and grieving. Therefore, Julia with medieval Ariadne-like passion still longs for her inconstant lover, while grieving tearfully over his despicable behaviour.

In Shakespeare's poem Lucrece and play Romeo and Juliet, Reid persuasively links Philomela from Book 6 of Ovid's Metamorphoses to the alba or dawn-song in Amores i. 13. The link is found in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and Gower's Confessio Amantis, literary works that undermine the appalling rape and mutilation of Philomela, and ignore her violent revenge on her husband Tereus. The medieval retelling of Philomela's tale begins a tradition where female rape is romanticized as the male lover's burning passion for his beloved. The female victim apostrophizes to the night her fear of dawn revealing her shame in what Reid terms an 'inverse alba' (p. 125). In an emotive paragraph, Reid catalogues a horrific medieval Ovidian romance tradition. Under the cover of the night, insatiable female beauty is unwittingly claimed by the male lover's heroic passions.

The last chapter challenges existing scholarship that...