Renaissance Ovids: The Metamorphosis of Allusion in Late Elizabethan England

Ovid has long been recognized as the quintessential poet of sex, violence, and political victimization, yet our critical accounts of his influence remain tentative and incomplete. Renaissance Ovids makes the case that in the 1590s, Elizabethan poets did not so much echo Ovid as speak to one another in Ovidian allusions. For many of them, choosing Ovid as a literary model---or, just as often, being seen not to choose him---became the premier means of self-identification within Elizabethan culture at large. The rise and decline of the early modern Ovidian vogue therefore provides an unsurpassed model of poetic influence---not as the diachronic re-employment of one poet by a successor, but as a living and evolving network of intellectual debate. Chapter 1, a broadly intertextual reading of Spenser's "Legend of Justice," examines the imitative poet's prerogative to comprehensive self-revision through the strategic deployment of Ovidian allusion. Beginning with the question of why the Faerie Queene's mythographic density should suddenly increase, even as the allegory of justice requires the exclusion of the classical deities and the artificial authority they impose, I find that Spenser isolates and systematically exploits Ovidian myths of disintegration, in order to produce an allusive counter-narrative at odds with his own increasingly oppressive allegory. I propose that Spenser's allusions to the victimized mortals of the Metamorphoses encode and essentially quarantine potential readerly sympathy for the unjust, with far-reaching ramifications for interpretations of his poem as a critique of Elizabethan policy in Ireland. In Chapter 2, I turn to the growing presence of Ovidian tropes and functions--- including mythological allusion, metamorphosis, and aetiology---on the rapidly evolving Elizabethan stage. I show how, in his early poems and plays, Shakespeare takes advantage of a fundamental imbalance between, on the one hand, a general over-reliance on Ovidian allusion as a means to characterization and, on the other, the unavailability of metamorphosis as an escape from dramatic situation. I argue that the tendency of Shakespeare's characters to impersonate Ovidian figures, or even to compel others to reprise mythological roles, culminates in the semi-metamorphic figure of Bottom. Chapter 3 challenges polarized critical accounts of George Chapman's Ovid's Banquet of Sense through a description and analysis of the poet's studied posture of ambivalence in the midst of the Ovidian vogue. Chapman seeks to balance two distinct Ovidian identities---champion of Neoplatonic allegory and notorious libertine and exile---in the single, composite figure of the Roman poet himself. With a constant eye on Marlowe and Spenser before him, Chapman centers himself within late Elizabethan literary culture by using Ovid as both a patsy and a proxy. Chapter 4 identifies John Donne and Ben Jonson as Ovidians, despite the latter's explicit and the former's implicit resistance to Ovid's influence. Donne's cultivation of the role of England's praeceptor amoris necessarily opposes his early erotic elegies to Ovid's original models. At the same time, Donne works toward the metaphysical metaphors of the Songs and Sonnets by purging allusions to metamorphosis from his poetry. Jonson's early plays and poems register a compulsive authorial tendency to perform Ovid's exile repeatedly, in each new genre, on stage after stage, paradoxically testifying to the indispensability of Ovidianism up to the end of the Elizabethan period.