Ovid, Pettie, and the Mythic Foundation of Cymbeline - Carmine Di Biase, Jacksonville State University
Ovid, Pettie, and the Mythic Foundation of Cymbeline
Carmine Di Biase, Jacksonville State University
I
When Shakespeare wrote Cymbeline he drew from a large, incongruous group of relatively modern sources, ranging from Boccaccio to Holinshed.1 The works of Ovid, however, continued to exert a powerful, though perhaps less obvious, shaping force on the poetic vision of the later Shakespeare. Jonathan Bate's comprehensive new study, which very likely will be definitive, confirms what previous studies have suggested: namely, that Shakespeare's handling of myth, which is "highly self-conscious" in the early poems, becomes, in the later plays, more subtle and more evocative.2 In his discussions of the late romances, Bate stresses The Winter's Tale and The Tempest; Cymbeline is discussed only briefly, perhaps because so much has been said already about the mythic qualities of this play (pp. 215-70)....
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