SOURCE: “Ovid's Metamorphoses and Shakespeare's Twelfth Night,” in Shakespearean Comedy, edited by Maurice Charney, New York Literary Forum, 1980, pp. 63-77.

[In the following essay, Lamb studies Shakespeare's use of internalized metamorphosis in his representation of Orsino and Olivia, as well as his application of “Ovidian” rhetoric in Twelfth Night.]

The contradictory attitudes held toward Ovid in the Renaissance complicate the relationship between Ovid's Metamorphoses and Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, or What You Will. According to one tradition-rooted in the Middle Ages and continuing vigorously into the seventeenth century, Ovid was a didactic teacher whose tales were really allegorical lessons about the human soul. Twelfth Night can be interpreted as a play about change within the souls of Orsino, Olivia, and Viola,¹ and metamorphosis serves as a metaphor for an inner spiritual state revealing that love can lead to either stasis or transcendence. The second Ovid, the urbane Ovid of the epyllia or erotic narratives still in fashion at the time of Twelfth Night, is diametrically opposed to the first. Delighting in his own verbal gymnastics and narrative poses, he is reflected in the interpretation of Twelfth Night as a play about characters who only perform roles and lack absolute identity.²

These opposite views of Ovid in the Renaissance are both valid. Many metamorphoses reveal spiritual states, and the narrator's attitude toward his material is often playful. In the end, the antithetical nature of Ovid's influence arises not from Renaissance literary traditions or modern interpretation, but from the complexity of the Metamorphoses itself.³

METAMORPHOSIS

Metamorphosis is a complex word: it refers both to the process and the product of the change. Ovid's Metamorphoses treats “of shapes transformde to bodies straunge”⁴; it portrays reality as an unstable chimera where gods become animals, women become trees, men become wolves, dragon's teeth become men. These changes are final, and mortals who undergo transformation will never again be human. These transformations sometimes occur at moments of extreme stress, when the normal identity is destroyed under the force of some unendurable emotion, such as Niobe's grief over the death of her children. Her physical transformation into a rock is merely the realization of what has already occurred on the emotional level.

Other transformations, like that of Io into a cow, proceed from a petty motive of a god or goddess, such as Jove's fear that Juno might discover his attempted rape of Io. If there is a meaning in Io's metamorphosis, it is in its senselessness, its portrayal of a world without order or justice. But most metamorphoses, whether they are inherently connected to an emotional state of the person transformed or not, do serve an etiological function. Marble “sweats,” for example, because Niobe continued to weep even after her transformation into stone. Taken together, the metamorphoses relate the history of the world from creation until the time of Augustus. They culminate in Caesar's transformation and Augustus' projected transformation, into a star, representing deification, transcendence of the mortal state.⁵

Medieval readers reasoned that the subject of the Metamorphoses could not truly be the apparently foolish tales of humans transformed into trees or birds or rocks. The tales must have some deeper meaning, or, if they were to be read at all, they at least must be given some use to repay the reader for his time. Consequently, readers allegorized the Metamorphoses on historical, physical or astrological, moral, and theological levels. By the Renaissance, these four levels began to yield to the moral level, which usually operated according to a fairly simple formula: the transformation of a man into a beast meant that his soul had become bestial; a god was simply a virtuous man; a metamorphosis into a star was an honor accorded to the righteous. Arthur Golding, who translated the Metamorphoses read by Shakespeare, related the system this way:

But if wee suffer fleshly lustes as lawlesse Lordes too reigne,
Than are we beastes, wee are no men, wee have our name in vaine.
And if wee be so drownd in vice that feeling once bee gone,
Then may it well of us bee sayd, wee are a block or stone.
This surely did the Poets meene when in such sundry wyse
The pleasant tales of turned shapes they studyed too devyse.

(Preface to the Reader, 11.111-16)

For Golding, Ovid's metamorphoses referred to spiritual states. Turning into a beast or stone was a metaphor for becoming less than human, and this kind of meaning took precedence over the etiological or historical framework important in Ovid's time. In some cases, the allegorical treatment produces an unforced meaning. In the example of Io's metamorphosis into a cow, however, the allegory works against the natural response to the tale. Jove, not Io, was guilty of bestial desires, yet Golding blames Io. Ovid's work was too complex for any rigid system, including that used by Golding and other Renaissance readers. The allegorizers posited a world that made sense in which the virtuous were rewarded and the evil punished; and according to this view, sexuality was especially to be abhorred. This was not Ovid's world and, while he was influenced by the allegorical method, it was not Shakespeare's either.

The opening scene of Twelfth Night provides us with an example of Shakespeare's use of Ovidian metamorphosis, as Orsino dignifies his love melancholy with the epic precedent of Ovid's Actaeon, the hunter who was changed to a deer and eaten by his own hounds as punishment for his accidental glimpse of the naked Diana:

O, when mine eyes did see Olivia first,
Methought she purged the air of pestilence.
That instant was I turned into a hart,
And my desires, like fell and cruel hounds,
E'er since pursue me.

(1.1.20-24)

Orsino's comparison of himself with Actaeon is trite, and it shows him in the stereotype of courtly lover. It also borrows a habit of mind from medieval and Renaissance commentators on Ovid's Metamorphoses. He has internalized an Ovidian tale to describe his own emotional state, with the hounds as his desires and the chase as taking place within his own soul.

This interpretation of the Actaeon myth had become commonplace by the late sixteenth century, when it appears in English sources. Geoffrey Whitney's popular Choice of Emblemes and Other Devises (1586) expounds its meaning under the heading “Voluptas aerumnosa” (sorrowful pleasure):

By which is ment, that those whoe doe pursue
Theire fancies fonde, and thinges unlawfull crave,
Like brutishe beastes appeare unto the viewe,
And shall at lengthe, Actaeons guerdon have:
And as his houndes, soe theire affections base,
Shall them devowre, and all their deedes deface.(6)

Orsino's implied analogy between Olivia and the goddess Diana gives us more insight into his character. He compliments his mistress for those very qualities, including inveterate virginity, which cause his suit's persistent lack of success; and his parallel between hounds and his desires shows his love to be a self-destructive force. Orsino's application of the Actaeon myth to himself reveals his own state of spiritual metamorphosis. He is stuck; he has reached a point of inner stasis from which there is no apparent rescue.

Orsino's name may point to another metamorphosis, less explicit than the Actaeon myth but perhaps still worth exploring. Orsino means “bear.” In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Juno, in her anger over Jove's seduction of Callisto, turned that beautiful maiden into a bear. The innocent Callisto had herself been deceived, for in order to approach her, Jove had transformed himself to resemble Diana, the goddess Callisto served. This ruse perhaps recalls Viola's disguise as a man to bring her into Orsino's presence. In fact, Orsino explicitly compares Viola to Diana at one point:

For they shall yet belie thy happy years
That say thou art a man. Diana's lip
Is not more smooth and rubious.

(1.4.30-32)

Like Actaeon, Callisto became a hunter hunted. Unlike Actaeon, however, she is rescued by Jove. When her own son Arcas is unknowingly about to kill his mother, she and her son both are transformed into stars, the highest honor possible for a mortal, an event which causes Juno disgruntlement:

I have bereft hir womans shape, and at this present howre
She is become a Goddesse.

(2.2.647-48)

The commentators on this tale agree that Callisto's metamorphosis into a bear proceeds from her moral deformity. Even though Ovid's tale portrays her as an innocent victim, the formula that anyone turned into a beast is really bestial wins out.⁷ Most of the commentators do not explain her metamorphosis into a star, except for Bersuire, who interprets it to mean that great and noble persons can sometimes come from paupers.

At the risk of committing the same kinds of excesses as my medieval predecessors, I am proposing the following line of inquiry: the implied metamorphosis in Orsino's name points to the dual potentiality towards subhumanity and transcendence possible through love. Callisto's change to a bear provides a judgment about Orsino's spiritual state similar to Actaeon's change to a stag. In each case the mythographers are more severe on the Ovidian characters than Shakespeare's play gives us warrant for Orsino, but there is a grain of truth in what they say. Although Orsino is not bestial, in his self-preoccupation he has become a stereotype of a lover. In this sense, perhaps, he is not fully human. In his rage over Olivia's love for Cesario, he becomes dangerously predatory like a bear: “I'll sacrifice the lamb that I do love / To spite a raven's heart within a dove” (5.1.124-25). These are the unfortunate effects of his love for Olivia, which is really a form of self-love. Yet the star metamorphosis points to another kind of love which he seems to feel for Viola, a love that leads to the marriage proposal typical of comic endings and to his regeneration.

Like the name Orsino, the name Olivia also perhaps implies a dual metamorphosis. At the beginning of the play, she fits both classic Ovidian myths of maidens transformed into trees. Like Daphne pursued by Apollo, she insists on her chastity despite Orsino's persistent suit; and like the sisters of Phaeton, in mourning her dead brother, she gives up a portion of her life. Golding follows the traditional interpretation of the Daphne tale by praising her as a “myrror of virginitie.”⁸ The fate of Daphne is however, threatening in a comic world. Prolonged virginity, a virtue esteemed by the predominantly religious community interpreting Ovid's tales, assumes a different value in the context of comedy, for it menaces the expected marriages at the end of the play and ultimately endangers the regeneration of the community itself. The lesson of the metamorphosis of Phaeton's sisters into willow trees to teach moderation in mourning⁹ fits the comic world without strain: Olivia's extreme vow to mourn her brother for seven years, abjuring the company of men the while, means giving up the most fertile years of her life.

Like the metamorphoses of Actaeon into a stag and Callisto into a bear, these transformations point to inner stagnation. At the beginning of Twelfth Night, Olivia's treelike spiritual state becomes explicit, ironically enough, when she declares her love for Cesario: “A cypress, not a bosom, / Hides my heart” (3.1.123-24). However, as with the Callisto myth implied in Orsino's name, the myth implied in her name holds out comic possibilities. She is not a laurel or a willow; she is an olive, a tree of peace and fertility. These qualities are released in her through her love for Cesario/Sebastian.

Viola explicitly describes her feelings in terms of internalized metamorphosis when she tells Orsino of her father's daughter's unrequited love for a man much like Orsino:

She never told her love,
But let concealment, like a worm i' th' bud,
Feed on her damask cheek. She pined in thought;
And, with a green and yellow melancholy,
She sat like Patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief.

(2.4.111-16)

Viola's description of her inward self as “Patience on a monument” evokes an Ovidian metamorphosis like Niobe's transformation to stone in her grief over her dead children. Critical to the metamorphosis of each is their inability to speak. One effect of Niobe's grief is that “even hir verie tung / And palat of hir mouth was hard, and eche to other clung” (6.388-89). “Patience on a monument” cannot speak either; like Niobe, she cannot even cry out in pain. She must, in fact, go one step beyond Niobe; she must smile.

Moreover, Viola's image is dynamic. A decay of natural growth is revealed by her metaphor of concealment as a “worm i' th' bud;” and Patience's monument suggests a love ending in the grave rather than the wedding bed. This image of inner stasis and decay is all the more moving because it contrasts so dramatically with Viola's behavior, which is so entertaining and sympathetic. Yet this description of her inward self reveals that Viola has reached an inner state not unlike Olivia's or Orsino's. The reasons for her emotional situation are admirable rather than neurotic. She is honor-bound not to reveal her identity to Orsino and to court Olivia for him; yet she is finally, like Olivia and Orsino, denying life rather than affirming it. At this point, her love for Orsino is as fruitless as his for Olivia. There is no apparent solution for any of them. Like Orsino's bear and Olivia's tree, Viola's “Patience on a monument” is an another internalized metamorphosis that reveals that her love for Orsino, like his for Olivia, has caused stasis and even decay within her soul.

Even though she has reached the same emotional state as Orsino and Olivia, Viola's behavior is quite different. Far from being preoccupied with her own problems, she can laugh with Feste and feel sympathy for Olivia. She has enough perspective to avoid confusing the present moment with the future; she trusts to Time: “O Time, thou must untangle this not I; / It is too hard a knot for me t'untie” (2.2.40-41). In this faith she resembles an Ovidian character whose love situation parallels hers. The moral of the story of Iphis, a woman loved by a woman, is that we must not become desperate even in the greatest difficulties, but we must trust to divine help.¹⁰ Iphis was a woman raised as a man because her father had ordered that any daughters her mother bore should be put to death. The goddess Isis, however, appearing in a vision to Iphis' mother, ordered her to save her infant by rearing her as a boy. Obeying the goddess, Iphis' mother raised her daughter to maturity, at which time she was betrothed to the lovely Ianthe, who loved her passionately. As the marriage date approached, Iphis and her mother prayed to Isis for help. Suddenly Iphis' stride grew longer, her face darkened, and she became a man and a happy bridegroom. This presents parallels with what happens between Olivia and Viola. Viola, a woman disguised as a man and loved by another woman, suddenly “becomes” her twin brother Sebastian, whose sudden appearance and wedding to Olivia are a providential solution to an impossible love situation.

The names and epithets of Viola and Sebastian point to an even closer relationship than that of twins. They are the male and female aspects of one function through which harmony is restored to society and love becomes a transcending power. John Hollander has already pointed out the significance of Viola's name: she is an instrument of “rhetorical music,” restoring balance in Orsino and Olivia and in the country of Illyria.¹¹ Sebastian's harmonizing power is implied in the sea captain's description of him as Arion:

I saw your brother,
Most provident in peril, bind himself
(Courage and hope both teaching him the practice)
To a strong mast that lived upon the sea;
Where, like Arion on the dolphin's back,
I saw him hold acquaintance with the waves
So long as I could see.

(1.2.11-17)

In this description, the sea captain was comforting Viola with the possibility of her brother's survival of the shipwreck through the agency of divine providence. In fact, his likening Sebastian to Arion implies more. In Ovid's Fasti, Arion, a talented lyre player, was about to be murdered for his money by a greedy ship's crew. As a last request, he asked to play his lyre; the beauty of its music summoned a dolphin, which carried him safely ashore.¹² The universal power of music, even over wild beasts, was a commonplace: Orpheus, for example, tamed animals with his music, and this tradition was implicit in Ovid's tale. In both Ovid's time and Shakespeare's, music was an emblem and an agent of divine order. Its power derived from its correspondence to the music of the heavenly spheres, manifestations of the divine order of the mind of God.¹³

The tempest that swallowed the ship carrying Viola and Sebastian, was a common Shakespearean representation of disorder, corresponding to disorder or madness in the human soul. Sebastian was not saved by providence entirely, for in the face of disaster he maintained his own sanity; the order of his own soul gave him the “courage and hope” to bind himself to a mast. Both the mast “that lived upon the sea” and the waves, with which he holds “acquaintaince,” are described as alive and friendly agents within a death-threatening chaos. He found them out, he trusted them, and they saved him. These same characteristics that save Sebastian are found in Viola. Her actions also reveal “courage and hope.” Never giving in to despair in the bleakest of circumstances, she trusts to time and she is saved. Together, Viola and Sebastian/Arion are emblems of divine music, both in the order of their own selves and in their ability to restore order to others. In this sense, they are one.

The identity of Viola and Sebastian is further revealed by Viola's assumed name Cesario, or “little Caesar,” which forms a pair with “Sebastos,” “the Greek equivalent of Octavian's epithet, ‘Augustus.’”¹⁴ Cesario and Sebastian represent a significant reference to the culmination of the Metamorphoses, Caesar's metamorphosis and Augustus' projected metamorphosis into stars. In Ovid's work, transformation into a star signified defication. According to allegorical tradition, as expressed by Golding, it signified the glory due virtuous acts: “The turning to a blazing starre of Julius Cesar showes, / That fame and immortalitie of vertuous doing growes” (Epistle to Leycester, 11.292-93).

In Twelfth Night, this transformation into a star also implies virtue, although in the living rather than the dead. Like the other metamorphoses in Twelfth Night, transformation into a star is internalized to represent a spiritual state. Viola's love for Orsino was a source of grief for her for much of the play; her inward self was static, like Patience on a monument. Now her love has a different kind of stasis, transcendence. Her love has transcended the turmoil and change usual in human lives to become like the star in Sonnet 116, one of Shakespeare's most profound statements on ideal love:

It is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

(11.4-8)

Metamorphoses into stars imply the same happy fortune for Sebastian's love for Olivia and Orsino's for Viola, through the Callisto myth.

RHETORIC

The most remarkable transformations in the Metamorphoses belong to the narrator, whose continually changing postures toward his own material play havoc with the responses of any sensitive reader. Absurd tales are told seriously; serious tales are told absurdly. Even within a single tale, his tone can change at the most unpredictable moment. Just as a reader is drawn into a tragic vision, the narrator jolts him with a comment that is flippantly incongruous. For example, when Phaeton's ill-fated attempt to drive the chariot of the sun sets the earth on fire, causes his own death, and creates such grief in his father that he prefers to leave the earth in darkness rather than to drive the chariot himself, the narrator points out the utility of these destructive conflagrations: “The brightnesse of the flame / Gave light: and so unto some kinde of use that mischiefe came” (2.419-20). Just when we had gotten absorbed in the tale, the narrator reminds us of his presence with a ridiculous sentiment appropriate to a Pollyanna of ancient Rome. Through such means he makes us highly aware of his role as narrator and in the process often makes fun of the essentially serious tales he has collected. And integral to his poses is his wit. Continually calling attention to itself through puns, small elegancies, clever ironies, his language often distances the most moving tales.

Ovid's manipulation of narrative role and his highly self-conscious use of language were valued and imitated in the Renaissance. They are primary characteristics of the Ovidian epyllia or little epics written at the end of the sixteenth century by authors like Thomas Lodge, Christopher Marlowe, as well as Shakespeare himself. Ovid's techniques were ideally suited to their attempt to embrace complexity and to portray reality through a variety of perspectives.¹⁵ For the writers of epyllia, as for Ovid, the primary subject of poetry is not the narrative material, but the varying attitudes toward it. Shakespeare, for example, often plays with incongruous narrative poses in his Ovidian Venus and Adonis when Venus' eyes, beholding her dead Adonis, are likened to snails whose tender horns are hit. In The Rape of Lucrece, the lustful Tarquin's hand, “smoking with pride,” “did scale” her bare breast whose veins suddenly left their “turrets” to tell Lucrece of her danger (11. 438-41). These bizarre comparisons inevitably draw attention to themselves, not unlike Ovid's “jerks of invention” admired by Shakespeare's pedant Holofernes (Love's Labor's Lost, 4.2.125-27).

Interest in manipulating roles perhaps accounts for the frequent presence of the female wooer in both Ovid and Shakespeare. The female wooer inevitably creates two feelings: a usually sympathetic reaction to her love and an awareness, sometimes humorous, of her reversal of roles. As Helena exclaims in A Midsummer Night's Dream: “We cannot fight for love as men may do; / We should be wooed, and were not made to woo” (2.1.242-43). Olivia's proposal to Sebastian, surprising enough as the proposal of a man to a woman, becomes hilarious because it comes from a woman to a man. Both sympathy and humor result as she enters with a priest to perform the ceremony. The female wooer is an ideal inhabitant of the essentially rhetorical reality portrayed in the Metamorphoses and in Twelfth Night. Just as Ovid's language constantly calls attention to the role of the narrator, so we become especially conscious of the role of lover when the expected roles are reversed. Our reaction is inevitably complex.

The Ovidian succession of roles is nowhere more apparent than in Viola's dazzling performance for Olivia. Disguised as Cesario, she begins her speech, intended to court Olivia for Orsino, with the expected flattery, “Most radiant, exquisite, and unmatchable beauty” (1.5.168), only to interrupt it by an ingenuous request to know which veiled lady is Olivia, for she doesn't want to throw away her speech, “excellently well penned” and difficult to learn, on the wrong person. First she flatters Olivia, and then she calls attention to her role as flatterer, one who must laboriously write and memorize compliments. In reacting to Olivia's unveiled face, she plays the role first of admirer and then of cynic: “Excellently done, if God did all” (1.5.236). Her response to Olivia's beauty is both admiration and criticism for leaving “the world no copy” (1.5.243). Finally, she embarks on an exquisite speech on how she would win Olivia if she (Cesario) were Orsino: she would “Hallo [Olivia's] name to the reverberate hills / And make the babbling gossip of the air / Cry out ‘Olivia!’” (1.5.273-75). Her role-playing is clear. Crying Olivia's name is not what she is doing; it is only what she would do if she were Orsino.

Her performance is splendid and highly self-conscious. She does not let Olivia forget for a moment that she is just role-playing. She even admits “I am not that I play” (1.5.182). Yet Olivia falls in love with her, and so in most performances does the audience, which is aware of the additional aritifice that Cesario does not exist except as a role adopted by Viola as a way of protecting herself in Illyria. In her succession of poses, in her distancing of her message by constantly pointing to her language and her role, she is brilliantly Ovidian. No one, not even Olivia, could mistake her for being “sincere.” Viola is real to us not in spite of her role-playing, but because of it. It is Viola's skill as an actress which marks her off from the other characters: Aguecheek, who is unable to portray the roles of “drinker, fighter, wencher,” as Joseph Summers points out;¹⁶ Olivia, who is at first confined to the limited role of mourner; Orsino, who is acting out the role of unrequited lover—they are all one-dimensional not because they are acting instead of being, but because they are limited actors.

Malvolio defines the Ovidian character by contrast. No character could be more artificial than the Ovidian narrator; no one could act more roles or parody his own role more. The difference between the Ovidian narrator and Malvolio is not between acting and being, artificiality and sincerity but between good acting and bad acting. A good actor like Viola can play many roles and regard them all with irony, and so she is a full character, able to respond to many different situations. A bad actor like Malvolio is doomed to be one-dimensional. And Malvolio is a bad actor. When he attempts the role of smiling lover, a part much easier than Cesario's role of courting an unwilling lady by proxy, Olivia misunderstands the nature of his attempted role. She thinks he is insane.

Malvolio's predictable, unimaginative responses make him an easy target for Feste's gulling. His refusal to believe in Pythagoras' theory of the transmigration of souls, for example, is the expected academic answer. It is, in fact, Golding's response in his Epistle to Leycester (11. 49-54), commenting on Pythagoras' oration, which makes up much of the last book of the Metamorphoses. Yet far from proving Malvolio's sanity, it points to his special form of madness: his rigidity. Malvolio stands against more than Pythagoras' theory of the transmigration of souls; he stands against change itself. Change is the essence of sanity in Twelfth Night, whether we view it as a play about transformations within the inward self or about actors performing roles. According to Pythagoras, all creatures change; change is our stay against annihilation; change is the essence of life itself. In this way, microcosm seems to mirror macrocosm. The constant change necessary to maintain order in the world is also necessary to maintain order within the self. In this sense, Malvolio is mad in his refusal to change; and we must, with Feste, doubt his sanity until he holds the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild fowl.

The consequences of his failure are these. Because he cannot act, he cannot change, and he is stuck with a single role: Malvolio, humorless and righteous conserver of his mistress' possessions, stifler of undue merriment. He cannot understand how Olivia, with the help of Feste, can laugh at her role of mourner; he certainly cannot share in the laughter. He most certainly cannot step outside his role for a moment to laugh at himself. But perhaps most important, he cannot forgive. He cannot imagine the roles of the other characters; he cannot act them out in his own imagination; he cannot imagine himself in their places. Thus their playing a practical joke on him is inconceivable. He cannot accept Olivia's proffered reparations, and he must leave vowing revenge.

Feste, of course, is the most Ovidian of all. He can assume any role: gentle yet thorough critic of Olivia; reveler with Sir Toby Belch; singer of melancholy songs for Orsino; Sir Topas, curate to Malvolio. Much of his humor is self-parody, on the nature and function of fools. Regarding the drunk Toby, he exclaims, “The fool shall look to the madman” (1.5.136); in reference to Viola's master Orsino, “The fool should be as oft with your master as with my mistress” (3.1.41); to Malvolio, “Then you are mad indeed, if you be no better in your wits than a fool” (4.2.92-93). Totally artificial, he is yet a sympathetic character whose effect on the play is profound.

To Feste is given the final song, ending this comedy on a melancholy note, reminding us that “the rain it raineth every day.” In his final stanza, he breaks down the difference between character and actor, play and reality beyond the stage: “our play is done, / And we'll strive to please you every day” (5.1.409-10). The ramifications of this dissolution of the barrier between stage and life are tremendous. Not only is the real actor playing Feste's part in Feste's situation, earning a small living from pleasing and perhaps instructing others with his performance, but the essentially dramatic reality in Twelfth Night flows out to the audience and real life. We are all actors assuming various roles with various degrees of competence. Like Viola and Malvolio, we are defined not by our “real selves,” but by our ability to play our roles, to step outside them, to understand the roles of others. Absolute reality and even absolute identity are illusory. This is the Rome celebrated by Ovid, and it seems much like Shakespeare's Illyria.

Notes

1. See Don Cameron Allen, Mysteriously Meant: The Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical Interpretation in the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1970), pp. 163-200; Douglas Bush, “Ovid Old and New,” Mythology in the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry (New York: W. W. Norton, 1932, rev. 1963), pp. 69-73; L. P. Wilkinson, Ovid Recalled (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), pp. 399-438. For allegories of Ovid's tales influential in the Renaissance, see Metamorphosis Ovidiana Moraliter a Magistro Thoma Walleys Anglico (Paris, 1511) (this work was really a fourteenth century allegory by Pierre Bersuire or Berchorius: see Allen, p. 168); Metamorphoseon. Libri XV. Raphaelis Regii … cum novis Jacob Micylli Viri eruditissimi additionibus (Venice, 1549); Shakespeare's Ovid Being Arthur Golding's Translation of the Metamorphoses (1567), ed. W. H. D. Rouse (Carbondale, Ill: Southern Illinois University Press, 1961); Abraham Fraunce, The Third Part of the Countesse of Pembrokes Ivychurch (London, 1592); P. Ovidii Metamorphosis, seu Fabulae Poeticae: Earumque interpretatio ethica, physica, historica Georgii Sabini (Frankfort, 1593) (this work was written by George Schuler: see Allen, p. 179); George Sandys, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Englished, Mythologized, and Represented in Figures, ed. Karl K. Hulley and Stanley T. Vandersall (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970).

2. See Elizabeth Donno, Elizabethan Minor Epics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963); William Keach, Elizabethan Erotic Narratives (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1977); Richard A. Lanham, The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), pp. 48-64, 82-110. A third Ovid, philosopher of mutability, has been demonstrated in Twelfth Night by D. J. Palmer, “Art and Nature in Twelfth Night,” Critical Quarterly, 9 (1967), 201-12.

3. See G. Karl Galinsky, Ovid's Metamorphoses: An Introduction to the Basic Aspects (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975); Lanham, pp. 48-64; Brooks Otis, Ovid as an Epic Poet (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1966).

4. Shakespeare's Ovid Being Arthur Golding's Translation of the Metamorphoses, p. 21; I, 1; all quotations from Ovid will be taken from this translation, hereafter called Golding's Ovid.

5. See especially Galinsky, pp. 45-69; and Otis, pp. 122-51, 260-63, and his argument (pp. 298-300) that the deification of Caesar and projected deification of Augustus were merely compliments and not meant to be taken seriously.

6. Whitney's Choice of Embles, ed. Henry Greene (London: Lovell Reeve, 1866); p. 15; see also Fraunce, M1. Other popular interpretations include Actaeon as a man whose estate was consumed by usurers, and the son of God pursued by cruel persons (Walleys/Bersuire, D2, D2^v). A man whose patrimony is consumed by hangers-on appears in Regio-Micyllus, E2; Golding, Epistle to Leycester, 11. 97-100; Fraunce, M1; Sandys, p. 151. The tale is moralized as a warning to avoid curiosity into the affairs of princes in Fraunce, M1 and Sandys, p. 151. Written after Twelfth Night, Sandys shows the conservatism of allegorical interpretation.

7. Walleys/Bersuire, C5, repeated word for word in Regio-Micyllus, D7, translation by Allen, p. 173 quoting from Paris, 1515 edition; Sabinus/Schuler, E1^v; Sandys, pp. 112-13. Regio-Micyllus adds that her change to a bear is also able to signify her change from prosperity to poverty.

8. Epistle to Leycester, 1.68. See also Walleys/Bersuire, B8^v; and Sandys, p. 74, who moralizes the tale to show what “immortall honour a virgin obtaines by preserving her chastity.”

9. Walleys/Bersuire, C4; Regio-Micyllus, D7; Sabinus/Schuler, D6^v; Sandys, p. 110.

10. Sabinus/Schuler, X7; Sandys, p. 449.

11. “Musica Mundana and Twelfth Night,” Sound and Poetry, ed. Northrop Frye, English Institute Essays, 1956 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957), pp. 80-82.

12. Ovid's Fasti, ed. and trans. James George Frazer (London: Macmillan, 1929), I, 59.

13. See, for example, S. K. Heninger, Touches of Sweet Harmony; Pythagorean Cosmology and Renaissance Poetics (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1974), pp. 6-7, 179-89.

14. John S. Lawry, “Twelfth Night and ‘Salt Waves Fresh in Love,’” Shakespeare Studies, 6 (1970), 108, n.17.

15. Keach, pp. 5-24; Lanham, pp. 48-64. Through these techniques they were able to express a quality Keach calls “ambivalence,” “the coexistence in one person of opposing emotional attitudes towards one subject” (p. xvi).

16. “The Masks of Twelfth Night,” University Review, 22 (1955), 28.

Bibliographical Note

The works of special use in my study of Ovid are Brooks Otis, Ovid as an Epic Poet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966); G. Karl Galinsky, Ovid's Metamorphoses: An Introduction to the Basic Aspects (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975); Richard A. Lanham, Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), pp. 48-64. For Renaissance understandings of Ovid, I was most impressed by William Keach, Elizabethan Erotic Narratives (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1977) and Don Cameron Allen, Mysteriously Meant (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1970). Essential works on Ovid's influence on Shakespeare include Lanham, Stephen Booth's edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); Eugene Waith, “The Metamorphosis of Violence in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Survey, 10 (1957) 39-49. Articles on Ovid's influence on Twelfth Night include D. J. Palmer, “Art and Nature in Twelfth Night,” Critical Quarterly, 9 (1967), 201-12, and Anthony Brian Taylor, “Shakespeare and Golding: Viola's Interview with Olivia and Echo and Narcissus,” English Language Notes, 15 (1977), 103-6.