Shakespeare's Ovid and the Spectre of the Medieval.
- Author/Editor
- Reid, Lindsay Ann.
- Title
- Shakespeare's Ovid and the Spectre of the Medieval.
- Published
- Woodbridge, Suffolk: D.S. Brewer, 2018.
- Review
- Reid "reconsiders a selection of Shakespearean moments that have been widely classified in contemporary scholarship as 'Ovidian'" in order to uncover "the under-acknowledged, spectral presence of the medieval in the making of such moments" (2). "It is," she asserts, "often a transhistorical, polyvocal, and multilingual conglomerate of intertexts that coalesce to form an 'Ovidian' allusion in Shakespeare's works" (4). Gower figures large in her study, throughout. Chapter 1 presents a close reading of the seventeenth-century "Chaucer's Ghoast," whence she derives a central sense of the "ambiguities of 'antiquity' in early modern usage, drawing attention to the profound intersections between the Ovidian, the Chaucerian, and the Gowerian" (6). Chapter 2 is part "reviewing and contrasting the various states of Shakespeare-and-Ovid, Shakespeare-and-Chaucer, and Shakespeare-and-Gower scholarship" (7). The focus of chapter 3 is "the medieval resonances of an 'Ovidian' reference to Ariadne in 'The Two Gentlemen of Verona'" which she traces to Chaucer and Gower (7). Chapter 5 argues that "the 'Ovidian' references to Narcissus evident in the interactions between Olivia and Viola in "Twelfth Night" build not only upon the "Metamorphoses"' Latin account of the youth's self-infatuation, but also upon a strikingly different tradition (featuring a heterosexual rather than a homosexual Narcissus) that seems to have first entered English literary tradition by way of Gower's 'Confessio Amantis'" (7). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 40.2.]
- Date
- 2018
- Gower Subjects
- Inlfuence and Later Allusion
Confessio Amantis