[In the following essay, Bate examines the profound influence of Ovid on Renaissance culture and Shakespeare's works. The critic additionally provides an overview of the Elizabethan educational system, describing the emphasis placed on memorizing and imitating Latin literary models.]

We need stories to help us make sense of the world. Things change. Men and women are driven, powerfully if not exclusively, by sexual desire (men in more aggressive ways). Myth, metamorphosis, sexuality: doubtless Shakespeare knew something about them by instinct; as a young man who got an older woman pregnant and then married her, he must have known a good deal about one of them from experience; but much of his most profound and characteristic thinking about them was derived from his reading of Ovid.

The enchantment which the law student from Sulmona exercised over the grammar-school boy from Stratford-upon-Avon was a matter of style as well as substance. Through the mouth of Holofernes the schoolmaster, the dramatist wittily apostrophized his own favourite classical poet: 'for the elegancy, facility, and golden cadence of poesy … Ovidius Naso was the man: and why indeed "Naso" but for smelling out the odoriferous flowers of fancy, the jerks of invention?' 'Naso' is, of course, from the Latin for 'nose'; the poet's very name is made to embody the gift for verbal play which Shakespeare inherited from him and which is exhibited to supreme effect in the drama in which Holofernes appears, Love's Labour's Lost. Ovid was the epitome of poetic stylishness: what better model for the ambitious young Elizabethan writer? The title-page of Venus and Adonis, the first work which Shakespeare saw into print, was adorned with an epigraph from the Amores, a proclamation of the poem's affiliation: 'Vilia miretur vulgus; mihi flavus Apollo Pocula Castalia plena ministret aqua'—'Let what is cheap excite the marvel of the crowd; for me may golden Apollo minister full cups from the Castalian fount' (Amores, I. XV. 35-6). Ovid is claimed as Shakespeare's route to the Castalian spring on the side of Parnassus, which is to say as his source of inspiration and his guarantor of high cultural status, his way of rising above the 'vulgus'. The poem from which the epigraph is quoted ends with the claim that poetry is a way of cheating death—the claim which is also that of Shakespeare's Sonnets and which is borne out every time Shakespeare reanimates Ovid and every time we reanimate either of them in the act of reading.

Ovid's inspiriting of Shakespeare seems to have been recognized ever since 1598, when Francis Meres undertook an exercise in the art of simile entitled 'A Comparative Discourse of our English Poets with the Greeke, Latine, and Italian Poets'. Not all of Meres's comparisons have been borne out by literary history—William Warner is no longer thought of as 'our English Homer'—but one of them is justly famous: 'As the soule of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras: so the sweete wittie soule of Ovid lives in mellifluous and hony-tongued Shakespeare, witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugred Sonnets among his private friends, &c.' Meres went on to assert that 'As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for Comedy and Tragedy among the Latines: so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage'. But this was not to say that Ovid's influence was restricted to Shakespeare's non-dramatic works, for the comparison with Plautus and Seneca is simply made in terms of shared excellence, whereas that with Ovid is phrased in such a way as to imply both stylistic and spiritual resemblance. The soul that has been metamorphosed into Shakespeare is that of Ovid, the poet of metamorphosis. Pythagorean metempsychosis, as expounded in the fifteenth book of the Metamorphoses, becomes a figure for the translation of one poet into another.

In support of Meres, one could list many points of similarity: a method of composition which involves shaping inherited stories in such a way that they are wrought completely anew; a refusal to submit to the decorums of genre, a delight in the juxtaposition of contrasting tones—the tragic and the grotesque, the comic and the pathetic, the cynical and the magnanimous; an interest above all else in human psychology, particularly the psychology of desire in its many varieties; an exploration of the transformations wrought by extremes of emotion; a delight in rhetorical ingenuity, verbal fertility, linguistic play; variety and flexibility as fundamental habits of mind and forms of expression. The Ovidian and the Shakespearian self is always in motion, always in pursuit or flight. And, bewilderingly, one can never be sure whether one is running towards what one desires or running away from it: no myth is more emblematic of the worlds of the two writers than that of Actaeon, the hunter who in punishment for his gaze upon the naked Diana becomes the hunted. When you think you've seen what you most desire, it destroys you.

Recent criticism has been much concerned with 'the flexibility of the self in Renaissance literature' [quoted from Thomas M. Greene in The Disciplines of Criticism (1968), ed. by Peter Demetz, Thomas Greene, and Lowry Nelson, Jr.]. Such criticism has not always recognized that the flexible self has a prime classical exemplar in Ovid. There could be no better motto for the Renaissance self-fashioner than some lines in the Ars Amatoria, which Shakespeare's fellow-dramatist Thomas Heywood translated as follows:

He that is apt will in himself devise
Innumerable shapes of fit disguise,
To shift and change like Proteus, whom we see,
A Lyon first, a Boar, and then a Tree.

The Ars is about how you fashion yourself as a lover; it recognizes that the well-fashioned lover is dextrous in the assumption of poses (you may even have to fake orgasm) and the handling of masks (Ovid also wrote a verse treatise on facial cosmetics). It also recognizes that the fashioning of the self is limited by the constraints of social convention and ultimately of state power; ironically for Ovid himself, this point was proved drastically when Augustus exiled him from Rome, partly because the poem appeared to be advocating sexual licence in general and female adultery in particular at a time when the Emperor was pursuing a programme of domestic moral reform. The specific impulse for the banishment of the poet in AD 8, a decade after the writing of the Ars, seems to have been connected with the adultery of the Emperor's grand-daughter, Julia, who was also exiled that year. Nine years earlier, Augustus' daughter, Julia's mother, also called Julia, had committed the same offence—Renaissance commentators confused the two Julias: hence Thomas Cooper's phrase, 'for abusynge Julia, daughter of the emperour Augustus', in the biography of Ovid cited at the beginning of this chapter. The confusion between the two Julias, and the identification of them with the 'Corinna' of Ovid's Amores, goes back at least as far as Sidonius Apollinaris in the fifth century.

What the Ars argues in its mock-didactics, the Amores exemplify in their nimble practice; the flexible self in these love elegies is the poet himself, working through a repertoire of attitudes and voices, writing as both subject and object, both poet and lover, in anticipation of the manner of Elizabethan love-poets like Sidney and Shakespeare in their sonnet sequences. Though theirs is a poetry of frustration and his of consummation, Petrarch could not have created Laura or Sidney Stella without the example of Ovid's Corinna. But Ovid is not only a self-dramatizer: in the Heroides and the Metamorphoses, he dramatizes others, most notably victims of desire, many of them women. The females who speak the Heroides and a variety of related figures in the Metamorphoses, for instance Myrrha and Medea, are among the models for the soliloquizing that is the distinctive activity of Shakespeare's most admired characters. The Ovidian dramatic monologue and the Shakespearian soliloquy create the illusion that a fictional being has an interior life. This illusion is achieved principally by the arts of language. The character's 'self is both created and transformed by the very process of verbal articulation; her or his 'being' is invented rhetorically. In Shakespeare, of course, the verbal rhetoric inherited from Ovid and other classical exemplars is accompanied by a new visual rhetoric of stage gestures and actions.

To think of Shakespeare as an Elizabethan Ovid is to see him as a typical, if exceptionally gifted, product of his age. Renaissance thinkers believed passionately that the present could learn from the past; the belief was the starting-point of education and a formative influence upon writing in the period. It was the essence of what we now call Renaissance humanism. The great Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives acknowledged that 'It is true there are those men who persuade themselves that a knowledge of antiquity is useless, because the method of living all over the world is changed, as for example in the erection of elegant dwellings, the manner of waging war, of governing people and states'. But he went on to claim that such an opinion was 'opposed to the judgement of wise men' and therefore against reason. 'To be sure,' he wrote,

no one can deny that everything has changed, and continues to change, every day, because these changes spring from our volition and industry. But similar changes do not ever take place in the essential nature of human beings, that is in the foundations of the affections of the human mind, and the results which they produce on actions and volitions. This fact has far more significance than the raising of such questions as to how the ancients built their houses or how they clothed themselves. For what greater practical wisdom is there than to know how and what the human passions are: how they are roused, how quelled?

The passage occurs in Vives' treatise of 1531, De tradendis disciplinis, 'on the transmission of knowledge'. There is no more vital humanist activity than the translation of the classics with the aim of transmitting knowledge, making the wisdom of the past available in the vernacular. Shakespeare was a product of the educational revolution in which Vives played a part: he was trained to value the classics and he was glad to use the new translations of them, such as Sir Thomas North's version of Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes. As a dramatist and hence a student of what Vives calls the 'human passions', he was especially interested in the classical texts in which the extremes of emotion were explored. Among these, none was more congenial to him than Ovid's Metamorphoses. This, I suspect, was partly because his sceptical, dynamic temperament would have had a certain resistance to the humanist implication that 'the essential nature of human beings' does not change; what Ovid taught him was that everything changes—'In all the world there is not that that standeth at a stay', as the character of Pythagoras sums it up in Book Fifteen—and this accorded with his desire as a dramatist to examine human beings at key moments of change in their lives, such as when they fall in love or make a renunciation or, most drastically, decide to kill themselves. Ovid's philosophy of instability modified the 'essentialist' premiss of humanism even as his exemplary force sustained it.

I use the word 'essentialism' to mean 'the belief that we possess some given, unalterable essence or nature in virtue of which we are human' [quoted from Jonathan Dolli-more in his Radical Tragedy (1984)]. The passage from Vives is a magisterial statement of this belief, though elsewhere, for example in his Fabula de homine of 1518, the same writer posits a more protean, Ovidian view of human nature: he imagines Jupiter sitting in an auditorium and watching man on a stage demonstrating his capability to become 'all things', one moment lion, wolf, boar, fox, and donkey (emblematic of the passions), the next a prudent and just civic being. One reason why Ovid was so valuable to sceptical humanists like Vives, Montaigne, and Shakespeare was that the fifteenth book of the Metamorphoses provided a beautiful solution to the problem of instability and change. Change itself becomes constancy, instability a fixed principle: the humanist is thus able to retain his faith that there is an essence in both human and non-human nature, whilst acknowledging the infinite variety of human passions and actions.

Readers who have inherited John Milton's image of Shakespeare in the poem 'L'Allegro' as 'Fancy's child', 'warbling his native woodnotes wild', will be puzzled by claims that he can be read in the context of Renaissance humanism and that his plays have an especially close relationship with the work of a classical author. Didn't Ben Jonson write in his elegy 'To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author Mr William Shakespeare', 'thou hadst small Latine, and lesse Greeke'? What about John Dryden's claim in the essay Of Dramatic Poesy that Shakespeare 'needed not the spectacles of books to read nature'? These are, however, relative statements: Shakespeare may have been unlearned by the standards of the Jonson who furnished his play Sejanus with marginal notes written in Latin or the Dryden who translated the complete works of Virgil, yet the classical accomplishments of the average Elizabethan grammar-school boy were considerable indeed by the standard of most of us today. And if 'lesse Greeke' really means 'less' rather than 'no', Shakespeare would have been above average, for Greek was only studied in the upper forms of the better schools, and it was not begun until Latin had been thoroughly mastered.

In his Essay on the Learning of Shakespeare, published in 1767, Richard Farmer, whose standards were those of the Master of a Cambridge college, showed that Shakespeare used Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch, and Arthur Golding's of Ovid, and furthermore that Plautus' Menaechmi, the principal source for The Comedy of Errors, his most formally classical play, had been done into English (albeit unpublished) by Warner. Dr Johnson was impressed: 'Dr Farmer,' he said, 'you have done that which never was done before; that is, you have completely finished a controversy beyond all further doubt.' [quoted by James Northcote, Memoirs of Sir Joshua Reynolds (London, 1813)]. But the scholarship of the subsequent two centuries has decided the question in the opposite direction: although Shakespeare used translations when he could, presumably for speed and convenience, he did read sources in Latin and French—in the case of Ovid he did not rely solely on Golding's Englished Metamorphoses of 1567.

His use of both the Latin original and the early Elizabethan translation may be demonstrated from his most powerful imitation of Ovid, Prospero's renunciation of his rough magic. The relevant passage in Ovid begins 'auraeque et venti montesque amnesque lacusque, dique omnes nemorum, dique omnes noctis adeste', of which a literal translation might be 'ye breezes and winds and mountains and rivers and lakes, and all ye gods of groves and of night, draw near' (Met. vii. 197-8). Golding translated this as 'Ye Ayres and windes: ye Elves of Hilles, of Brookes, of Woods alone, Of standing Lakes, and of the Night approche ye everychone' (Golding, vii. 265-6). The first line of Prospero's speech is 'Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves' (Tempest, v. i. 33). Shakespeare got his elves from Golding (in Ovid they are 'gods' and are not associated with the hills) and he also followed the translator in amplifying 'lacus' into 'standing lakes'. But later in the speech, where Ovid had 'convulsaque robora' ('and rooted up oaks'), Golding did not specify the kind of tree ('and trees doe drawe'), so Shakespeare must have gone to the Latin for his 'and rifted Jove's stout oak'. Again, Golding lacks an equivalent for the ghosts actually coming out of their tombs: Prospero's 'Graves at my command Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let 'em forth' is a version of Ovid's 'manesque exire sepulcris'. Medea in Ovid says that she has made the sun go pale by means of her song ('carmine nostro'); Golding has 'Our Sorcerie dimmes the Morning faire'; Shakespeare neatly combines the song and the sorcery with Prospero's climactic 'By my so potent art', the art being that of both the sorcerer and the poet-singer. Medea's use of the noun 'carmen' allies her with Ovid himself, for he began the Metamorphoses with a reference to his own unbroken song, 'perpetuum carmen' (i. 4); in a similar way, the phrase 'my so potent art', spoken by a character who has a little earlier put on a play, cannot but ally Prospero's magic with the magic of Shakespeare's verbal and theatrical arts. This is not, however, to say that Prospero's renunciation of his magic is Shakespeare's farewell to the stage.

The fact of Shakespeare's imitation of Ovid is beyond dispute; it is much more difficult to be sure of its implications. Were Jacobean audiences of The Tempest supposed to recognize the imitation and, if so, were they then supposed to reflect upon Prospero's art in relation to that of Ovid's Medea? Charles and Michelle Martindale, in their book on Shakespeare and the Uses of Antiquity, think that the answer to the first part of the question is probably 'yes,' to the second part, definitely 'no':

In this instance it should be plain that the use Shakespeare is making of Ovid is imitative, not allusive; educated members of the audience would recognize the presence of Ovid, but there is no question of any such complex interplay between the divergent meanings of the two texts as our more ingenious critics so often suppose.

I believe that the Martindales are wrong about this. The distinction between stylistic imitation and purposeful allusion would not have been made in this way in the Renaissance. Sixteenth-century models of reading were always purposeful: texts from the past were valued for their applicability to present endeavour. Hence the widespread habit of extracting wise passages from their sources and transcribing them in 'commonplace' books which built up a composite model of ideal behaviour. In writing Prospero's speech, Shakespeare is following a standard humanist procedure: he needed a formal invocation of magical powers, so he imitated a famous classical example of one. To imitate it was to assert its continuing relevance; humanist imitation was based on the premiss that classical texts were appropriate patterns or models because they embodied fundamental, enduring truths. This was the point that Vives made. The act of imitation here implies that all invocations of magical power are in some sense the same—just as a Renaissance imitation of an Ovidian locus amoenus implies that all loci amoeni are in some sense the same—and therefore that Prospero and Medea are in some sense the same.… [I] suggest that the imitation is an allusion and is supposed to be recognized as such. What I mean by allusion is that the source text is brought into play (from Latin al-ludo, to play with); its presence does significant aesthetic work of a sort which cannot be performed by a submerged source.

It should also be pointed out that the Martindales' sneer at 'our more ingenious critics' is oddly patronizing to the Renaissance. It implies that Shakespeare and his audience were simple souls who never got beyond stylistic elegance, who lacked the ingenuity to make associations between dramatic characters and mythical archetypes. But Renaissance mythography was as inventive as anything in modern critical theory. Despite the reservations of humanists such as Erasmus, for whom myth was a repository of moral wisdom rather than a system of mystical correspondences, the tradition of multiple interpretation, inherited and adapted from the Middle Ages, was still very much alive. Edmund Spenser, say, or George Sandys, author of Ovid's Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologiz'd, and Represented in Figures, would have had no difficulty in finding historical, moral, and allegorical meanings in a single story. Sir John Harington's reading, published in 1591 [in the Preface to his translation of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso], of the slaying of the Gorgon Medusa by Perseus is worth quoting at length as an example of this interpretative technique:

Perseus sonne of Jupiter is fained by the Poets to have staine Gorgon, and, after that conquest atchieved, to have flown up to heaven. The Historicall sence is this, Perseus the sonne of Jupiter, by the participation of Jupiters vertues which were in him, or rather comming of the stock of one of the kings of Creet, or Athens so called, slew Gorgon, a tyrant in that countrey (Gorgon in Greeke signifieth earth), and was for his vertuous parts exalted by men up unto heaven. Morally it signifieth this much: Perseus a wise man, sonne of Jupiter, endewed with vertue from above, slayeth sinne and vice, a thing base & earthly signified by Gorgon, and so mounteth up to the skie of vertue. It signifies in one kind of Allegorie thus much: the mind of man being gotten by God, and so the childe of God killing and vanquishing the earthlinesse of this Gorgonicall nature, ascendeth up to the understanding of heavenly things, of high things, of eternal things, in which contemplacion consisteth the perfection of man: this is the naturali allegory, because man [is] one of the chiefe works of nature. It hath also a more high and heavenly Allegorie, that the heavenly nature, daughter of Jupiter, procuring with her continuali motion corruption and mortality in the inferious bodies, severed it selfe at last from these earthly bodies, and flew up on high, and there remaineth for ever. It hath also another Theological Allegorie: that the angelicali nature, daughter of the most high God the creator of all things, killing & overcomming all bodily substance, signified by Gorgon, ascended into heaven. The like infinite Allegories I could pike out of other Poeticall fictions, save that I would avoid tediousnes.

Readers who are inclined to accuse modern critics of over-ingeniousness should keep an analysis such as this beside them as a touchstone of Renaissance ingenuity. As will be shown, even Shakespeare, whose hermeneutics were much less formal than Harington's are in this passage, frequently invoked myths as patterns within the plays, and when invoking myths sometimes also assumed knowledge of the received moral interpretation of them. When Cleopatra says that Antony is 'painted one way like a Gorgon', it is left to the audience to supply the interpretation of the simile.

Harington's interpretative strategy is premissed on the conviction that allegory shadows forth a universal interconnectedness; this enables him to pull together pagan narrative and divine revelation, and thus to defend poetry from the strictures of puritans. Ultimately, both the practice of humanist imitation and Renaissance hermeneutics more generally draw strength from a belief in the read-ability of the world: myths, classical texts, nature itself, are books in which moral truths may be read. Thus not only are all loci amoeni alike, they may all be read as vestiges of the classical Golden Age, which, according to the syncretic way of thinking so much favoured in the Renaissance, is itself equivalent to Eden before the Fall.

Mythological allusion pervades Elizabethan and Jacobean writing.… For it to have been worth its place in the drama, dramatists must have presumed that at least a proportion of their auditory was capable of 'reading' it. Having described the different ways of interpreting the story of Perseus and the Gorgon, Harington anatomized Renaissance readers into three kinds: 'the weaker capacities will feede themselves with the pleasantnes of the historie and sweetnes of the verse, some that have stronger stomackes will as it were take a further taste of the Morali sence, a third sort, more high conceited then they, will digest the Allegorie'.… Ben Jonson made a similar, though twofold, distinction with regard to the audience for theatrical shows: he contrasted those with 'grounded judgements' who merely used their 'gaze' to enjoy the spectacle, and 'the sharpe and learned' who had the wit to comprehend his allegories. Shakespeare's colleagues, John Heminges and Henry Condell, addressed the First Folio of 1623 'To the great Variety of Readers', who, they said, were numbered 'From the most able, to him that can but spell'. The great variety of playgoers who frequented the Rose, the Globe, and the Blackfriars in Shakespeare's lifetime covered a similar spectrum; the most able—the university and Inns of Court men—would have been intimately versed in both classical texts and the art of allegorical interpretation, while even those who had read but little would have had a rudimentary working knowledge of ancient mythology. And for Elizabethan culture, Ovid's Metamorphoses constituted the richest storehouse of that mythology.

Shakespeare's ideal spectator would have shared the dramatist's own grammar-school education. The comic but affectionate portrayals of pedantic schoolmasters in Love's Labour's Lost and The Merry Wives of Windsor suggest that Shakespeare may often have been bored at school, but they leave no room for doubt that he did go to school. John Aubrey, on the not wholly unreliable testimony of the son of a member of Shakespeare's acting company, established a tradition that in the so-called 'lost years' of the 1580s Shakespeare was himself a schoolmaster; E. A. J. Honigmann [in his Shakespeare: The 'Lost Years' (1985)] has recently proposed that those years were spent as tutor to a Catholic family in Lancashire, and that the recommendation for this post may have come from a Stratford schoolmaster with a high opinion of Shakespeare's accomplishments. Even if we discount these scholastic possibilities, we cannot question the competence of Shakespeare's Latin, small as it may have been by Ben Jonson's prodigious standards. Latin was the substance of the grammar-school curriculum (it is to Latin that the epithet 'grammar' applies); and within that curriculum, Ovid occupied a very special place, as will be shown in the next section of this chapter. Shakespeare got a good enough education for him to be able to base his Lucrece on a story in Ovid's Fasti, which was not published in an English translation until well after his death.

I do not suppose for a moment that any individual seventeenth-century reader of Shakespeare, still less a playgoer, would have consciously recognized, let alone reflected upon the significance of, all the Ovidian associations which I discuss in this book. Where professional critical readers pursue their theme with relentless single-mindedness, readers for pleasure and, to an even greater degree, playgoers—both Renaissance and modern—attend to many different facets of the Shakespearian text and cannot always be expected to attend to it at all (in the Elizabethan theatre there would have been a lot of distractions, what with nut-cracking neighbours and prostitutes plying their trade). A literary-historical book of this sort by its nature regularizes and gives apparent unity to connections that an ordinary reading or viewing will only make fragmentarily and spasmodically. But by picking out the figure in the carpet it becomes possible to discern that Shakespeare was an extremely intelligent and sympathetic reader of Ovid and that his readings are embedded in his own works. And I am convinced that every individual connection I make could have been perceived by an educated Elizabethan: it must be stressed again that the method of reading which this book adopts is a Renaissance method. For the Renaissance, reading meant reading with a consciousness of the classics. The author of the Gesta Grayorum, an account of the revels at Gray's Inn during the winter of 1594-5, considered The Comedy of Errors to be 'like to Plautus his Menechmus'. This book imagines other educated Elizabethan playgoers returning to Shakespeare's works and again and again finding them, despite the differences of genre, like to Ovid his Metamorphoses.

As I affirmed in my preface, one compelling reason for writing a study of Shakespeare and Ovid at this time is the simple fact that fewer and fewer students and playgoers are now versed in the classics as their Renaissance forebears were. Dramatists like Shakespeare and Thomas Heywood did not want the classics to be what they have now become, the preserve of a tiny intellectual élite. They took Ovid out of the academy and put him on the popular stage; in his Golden Age, Silver Age, Brazen Age, and Iron Age plays, Heywood actually dramatized a whole collection of stories from the Metamorphoses for the audience of the Red Bull, the most notoriously 'lowbrow' of the London theatres. In the prologue to The Silver Age, he made a distinction regarding his audience that was similar to Jonson's: the 'learned' come to the theatre with their 'judging wits', while the 'ruder' respond only with their 'eyes'. The prologue continues, 'Since what we do, we for their use compile': 'their' refers to both segments of the audience, which is to say that Heywood is compiling his mythological material for the 'use' of all kinds of theatregoer. In the epilogue to The Brazen Age, he addressed the 'unlettered' in the audience, asking them 'Rather to attend than judge; for more than sight We seeke to please'. Heywood was writing at a time when the morality of the theatre was under attack from puritan polemicists: there could be no better riposte than the claim that the drama could traverse 'The ground of ancient Poems' and bring edification of the kind that was the rationale of humanist educational theory. Indeed, performance could evoke the substance (res) of ancient poems, whereas education was locked into analysis of their grammar, syntax, and rhetoric (verba); the drama brought the classics to life, whereas the techniques of the schoolroom killed them stone dead. In his own way, Shakespeare had anticipated Heywood in this project: … [I] suggest that in Titus Andronicus he undertook both a critique of a schoolroom education and a defence of a theatrical one. Shakespeare's Ovidianism proposes that the classics need not be only a matter of rote-learning and beatings, of Sir Hugh Evans's 'hig, hag, hog' and 'If you forget your quis, your ques, and your quods, you must be preeches' [Merry Wives of Windsor, IV. i. 38, 71-2]. Elizabethan theatrical Ovidianism constitutes an exceptionally fruitful embrace between 'high' and 'low' culture; it proves that the classics can reach a popular audience, can give pleasure even as they edify, can be a source of profound vitality.

Shakespeare enjoyed Ovid hugely, but also found in him a source of disturbance. The coexistence of vitality, enjoyment, and disturbance is apparent above all in the matter for which Ovid was best known in the Renaissance, that of human desire and sexuality. Sexual behaviour is of course determined by culture as well as nature, but culture has its continuities: in the Ars Amatoria, Ovid associates theatregoing with sex, noting that the theatre is a good place to take a prospective lover, since 'the rows compel closeness, like it or not, and by the conditions of space your girl must be touched' (Ars Am. i. 141-2). This is as good a piece of advice for the young man about town in Shakespeare's time or in ours as for Ovid's implied reader. Whether Ovid is advising on such preliminaries or on the art of achieving simultaneous orgasm (Ars Am. ii. 719-28), he has a modernity which may be seen as testimony to literature's power to continue to work beyond its moment of production. Using the Ars Amatoria as a sex manual may not be quite what the learned humanists had in mind when they recommended the study of the classics, but the efficacy of doing so proves their point that we can learn from the literature of the past. Roman marriage, Elizabethan marriage, and modern marriage are very different things, but to read Ovid and Shakespeare today is to see that neither the lightness nor the darkness of sexual desire has changed so very much over two millenniums.

This continuity might seem to offer support for Vives' claim about 'the essential nature of human beings'. His grand phrase 'the foundations of the affections of the human mind, and the results which they produce on actions and volitions' could be translated into Sigmund Freud's single word, libido. Freud himself viewed both classical myth and Shakespearian drama as anticipations, and hence proofs, of his own 'essentialist' account of human sexuality. There has accordingly been a steady stream of books and articles translating the language of Shakespeare's plays into that of psychoanalysis—every student knows about Hamlet's Oedipus complex. I am, however, sceptical of this procedure and I have done everything I can to avoid such translation, on the grounds that it is tendentious enough to move between the languages of texts composed for particular purposes in Rome around the beginning of the Christian era and in London around the beginning of the seventeenth century without also introducing that of texts which Freud composed for particular purposes in Vienna around the beginning of the twentieth. Shakespeare's representations of sexuality may be Freudian—or Kleinian or Lacanian—but my concern is to show that they are Ovidian.

Freud notwithstanding, the fact that these representations still elicit a nod of recognition does not necessarily mean that the dynamics of sexual desire are universally constant. Their endurance may instead be a demonstration of the way in which life imitates art. That sexuality is learnt from poets as much as it is determined by biology would seem to be the view of Montaigne in the sixteenth century's wisest and most playful essay on the subject, 'Upon some Verses of Virgil': there it is argued that the 'power and might' of erotic desire 'are found more quick and lively in the shadowe of the Poesie, th[a]n in their owne essence'. For Montaigne, literature serves to educate the reader in sexual language: 'It is high time indeed for us to go studie the phrases of Amadis, the metaphors of Aretine, and eloquence of Boccace'—that is to say, to study erotic texts—'thereby to become more skilfull, more ready and more sufficient to confront them: surely we bestow our time wel'. As one recent commentator on the mythological tradition in the French Renaissance puts it [Ann Moss in her Poetry and Fable (1984)], 'When Montaigne turns to himself he finds that it is not in searching his own memory that he recovers most fully the experience of love, but in reading the stylised formulations of poetic fiction.' In Shakespearian comedy, love is among other things an art learnt from Ovid.

Ovid was not of course the first poet to make sex full of both fun and anguish, but for Western culture he has been the one in whom the joy of sex has found its foremost apologist and the pain of desire one of its most skilled analysts. This is due in considerable measure to the hazards of manuscript transmission in pre-print culture: had more of Sappho survived, she might have taken the credit. Indeed, Ovid would have been the first to acknowledge the supremacy of Sappho. In the Tristia (ii. 365) she is cited as his precedent as a teacher of the art of love, and in the fifteenth of the Heroides he writes in her voice and so celebrates her poetry even as he ironically twists her lesbianism by making her the victim of heterosexual desire:

But once I seemed beautiful enough, when I read
  my poems to you.
  You swore that, alone among women, I took
  grace always from the
  words I spoke.
I would sing, I remember—lovers remember it
  all—
  As I sang, you returned me my kisses, kisses
  stolen while I sang.

Whilst listening to Ovid's reanimation of Sappho, we should take the opportunity to acknowledge that his writing can be charged with a sexual intensity which Shakespeare was wholly incapable of reproducing (in the Elizabethan age only Donne comes near it). Here, for instance, is a translation of what must be Western poetry's most stirring account of a woman's wet dream:

             My dreams bring you back to me:
  dreams more intense and dazzling than radiant
  day.
I find you in those dreams, although you are
  worlds away.
  But sleep offers pleasures too brief to satisfy.
Often it seems that your arms are holding the
  weight of my neck,
  often I seem to be holding your head in my
  arms;
the kisses are familiar, those kisses, tongue to
  tongue, I recognize them,
  the kisses you used to take and give back to
  me.
Sometimes I caress you, and say words that
  seem utterly real,
  and my lips are awake, responsive to all that I
  feel.
I hesitate to say what happens next, but it all
  happens,
  there's no choice, just joy, and I'm inundated
  with it.

In the arena of sexuality, Ovid was both an original and an inheritor of Sappho and others; in that of myth, he was equally both an innovator and a rewriter of material from a vast range of earlier writers, most notably Euripides and Callimachus. He did not invent his stories, he just happened to have codified them and told them in an artful and memorable way at an unusually stable moment in early Western culture. The idea of myth presents as many theoretical problems as that of sexuality. Again, my aim has been to present the material in the terms of Ovid and his Renaissance readers, not to translate it into those of some later theorist. There may be a book to be written on Shakespeare and the Metamorphoses in relation to Claude Lévi-Strauss's theory that myths encode the deep binary structures of all cultures, but this is not it. Jacques Derrida's essay on Lévi-Strauss, 'Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences', is one of the foundation texts of deconstruction, but my aim is to reconstruct, not deconstruct Renaissance mythography. There is a certain smack of Derridean hermeneutic play about Sir John Harington's multiplication of readings of the Gorgon myth, but with a crucial difference: for a Renaissance reader multiple readings offer many roads to truth, whereas for Derrida reading is a circular road going to nowhere but itself. In order to understand the work that myth does for Shakespeare—and to try out for ourselves whether it can do any work for us—we have to suspend our disbelief in the possibility of words and stories referring to a reality beyond themselves. We certainly do not have to believe that Shakespeare's sonnets were written out of personal desire for the Earl of Southampton or whoever, but we do have to believe that even if desire may be read as a textual phenomenon, as Montaigne seems to imply, love-poetry can be made to serve extra-textual ends. We do not have to believe in gods; we do not even have to believe that Shakespeare and Ovid believed in them. But we do have to believe in the reality of the human conditions and aspirations that are storied in myth—negatively, that desire is often blind (Cupid) or self-consuming (Narcissus, Actaeon); positively, that a marriage might be blessed (Hymen), a harvest might be good (Ceres), or society a fairer place (the Golden Age). In its assumption that one of the values of literary and dramatic creations is their capacity to speak of such conditions and aspirations, this book is unapologetically a work of reconstructed humanism.

Shakespeare was fortunate in his place of birth. In 1553 the King's New School at Stratford-upon-Avon was chartered as a free grammar school that would employ one master who was to be comparatively well remunerated with twenty pounds a year and housing. Shakespeare probably entered the grammar school at the age of seven in 1571, having already spent two or three years at an attached petty school where, under the auspices of an usher, he would have learnt reading, writing, and the catechism. The grammar-school master from 1571 to 1575 was one Simon Hunt, and for the next four years the post was held by Thomas Jenkins. They both seem to have been able men, with Oxford degrees; Jenkins had for some years been a fellow of St John's College. A measure of the quality of the Stratford education is that Richard Field, a near contemporary of Shakespeare, began an apprenticeship in London after leaving school and rapidly became one of England's best printers of classical texts—his work included an important annotated edition of the Metamorphoses published in 1589. It was to Field that Shakespeare turned a few years after this for the printing of his Venus and Adonis and Lucrece.

The grammar-school curriculum was limited but intense. It depended on learning by rote: Shakespeare and his contemporaries had Latin words and structures ingrained upon their memories in such a way that classical influences would inevitably shape their verbal forms in later life. The principal aim of an Elizabethan education was for the student to learn not merely to read Latin with facility, but also to write and speak it. He (girls did not attend the grammar school) would begin with William Lily's A Shorte Introduction of Grammar and complete his accidence and syntax in the same author's Brevissima Institutio, which was illustrated with examples from various Latin authors, such as the line from Horace that Chiron in Titus Andronicus remembers from reading in his grammar. At this early stage, he would also be required to construe and translate from collections of maxims such as Leonhardus Culmannus' Sententiae Pueriles and the Disticha Moralia (ascribed to Cato, with scholia by Erasmus). These collections provided the origin of many of the tags and sententiae that are found so frequently in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. It was a favourite Renaissance practice to extract moral wisdom from the classics in the form of adages and apophthegms; the educated members of Shakespeare's audience would accordingly have been adept in the art of recognizing classical allusions, whether they were highly self-conscious, as in some of the early works, or woven more subtly into the text, as in the later plays.

At a later stage, the sententiae in Culmannus and Cato would provide the basis for rhetorical exercises in amplification. Thus not only the pithiness, but also the prolixity and rhetorical inventiveness of Elizabethan writers have their roots in the educational system. One of the major rhetorical texts used in schools was Erasmus' De Copia, which instructed in the art of using tropes and schemes to imitate classical copiousness; Ovid was seen here as the most copious of authors, his description of Hecuba in the thirteenth book of the Metamorphoses as the exemplary illustration of the use of extreme 'copia' to create emotion. Dramatic laments in plays from Gorboduc onwards make Hecuba into 'a mirror' of woefulness. The player's speech in Hamlet, with its accumulation of figures designed to elicit sympathy for the passion of Hecuba, is a standard rhetorical set-piece. But although any grammar-school boy would have been given the training to have a stab at the exercise, few could have undertaken it with the facility of Shakespeare. His contemporaries recognized and appreciated this, praising his distinctive qualities with such epithets as 'sweet', 'honie-tong'd', 'hony-flowing Vaine', 'fine filed phrase', 'happy and copious', 'mellifluous'. These were the terms in which the Elizabethans also praised Ovid. Gabriel Harvey spoke of 'conceited' Ovid, Thomas Lodge of his 'promptnes' in versification; to Thomas Nashe, he was 'silver-tong'd' and 'well-tun'd' in his style. The two writers offered respective Latin and English exemplars of facility, copiousness, mellifluous rhetoric, and verbal wit. In the mid-seventeenth century, Thomas Fuller would associate Shakespeare with 'Ovid, the most naturali and witty of all Poets'.

Rigorous rhetorical training was undergone in the upper school, where boys were drilled in the writing of epistles, themes, and orations. The textbook for themes was Aphthonius' Progymnasmata, in which Shakespeare would have found Ovid's story of Venus and Adonis discussed as an example of narratio (and immediately followed by citation of Pyramus and Thisbe). The upper school would also have provided Shakespeare with his first exposure to the major Roman poets in themselves, rather than in extract. Ovid, being perhaps the easiest to read and to imitate in verse-writing exercises, occupied the foremost place. Extensive reading and memorizing of the Metamorphoses was almost universally required in sixteenth-century grammar schools. In addition, at most schools selections from one or more of Ovid's other works were studied, most frequently the Fasti, his poem on Roman festivals and ceremonies, the Heroides, his elegies in the form of imaginary letters from legendary heroines to their lovers or husbands, and Tristia, his laments written in exile.

Exercises in imitation were usually based on passages from collections of elegant extracts, such as Mirandula's Illustrium Flores Poetarum, in which Ovid was heavily represented. Little changed in the grammar-school curriculum between the late sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries, so Shakespeare was in all probability taught in a manner similar to that recommended by John Brinsley a generation later (Brinsley explicitly based his system on the Scholemaster of Roger Ascham, Queen Elizabeth's tutor):

Take Flores Poetarum, and in every Common place make choise of Ovids verses, or if you find any other which be pleasant and easie: and making sure, that your schollars know not the verses aforehand, use to dictate unto them as you did in prose. Cause also so many as you would have to learne together, to set downe the English as you dictate.… having just the same words, let them trie which of them can soonest turne them into the order of a verse … And then lastly, read them over the verse of Ovid, that they may see that themselves have made the very same; or wherin they missed: this shall much incourage and assure them.

Thus the boys would be expected not merely to translate back into Latin, but to produce a rhetorical arrangement that corresponded to Ovid's original; the exercise is analogous to that in the training of a musician, whereby the student is given a melody and asked to harmonize it in the style of a particular composer. It is not an exaggeration to say that Shakespeare's first lessons in poetry were lessons in the imitation of Ovid. Brinsley describes the method of double translation as the pupil's 'first entrance into versifying':

By the translations of the Poets, as of Ovid, and Virgil, to have a most plain way into the first entrance into versifying, to turne the prose of the Poets into the Poets owne verse, with delight, certainty and speed, without any bodging; and so by continuali practice to grow in this facilitie, for getting the phrase and veine of the Poet.

Another common exercise was to write letters in the style of the Heroides: in so doing, the student had to find a rhetoric appropriate to a fictional character's circumstances and passions. The dramatist's art begins here. Even as a mature playwright Shakespeare would continue to base his composition on inherited texts; in Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, for example, Sir Thomas North's prose originals are transformed into elegant verse, sometimes word for word, but always with a distinctive rhetorical arrangement.

The exclusive study of Latin, learning by rote, writing according to rhetorical formulas, reproducing the sententiae and the beauties of classical authors, the work of imitation: these fundamentals of Elizabethan education exercised a profound influence on Shakespeare's writings and the ways in which his audiences read them, whether on stage or page. It is only by an effort of historical reconstruction that we can learn to share the educated Elizabethan's frisson of pleasure in the recognition of a familiar sentiment, an elegantly turned phrase, a delicate rhetorical manœuvre, a full-scale imitation.

We have no record of Shakespeare's early reading habits outside the classroom, but it is not fanciful to suppose that his experience was similar to Montaigne's (though one suspects that Shakespeare would not have been such a precocious developer, since his father would not have educated him in Latin from his very early years, as Montaigne's did): 'The first taste or feeling I had of bookes, was of the pleasure I tooke in reading the fables of Ovids Metamorphosies; for being but seven or eight yeares old, I would steale and sequester my selfe from all other delights, only to reade them.' From his grammar-school training and his reading of Golding's translation, Shakespeare grew to know the fables extremely well. All fifteen books of the Metamorphoses make themselves felt in his works in the form of mythological allusions and borrowings of phrase. His range of reference may be seen from a list of the stories which we will find were of particular significance to his work: the Golden Age (Book One); Phaëthon (Book Two); Actaeon, Narcissus and Echo (Book Three); Pyramus and Thisbe, Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (Book Four); Ceres and Proserpina (Book Five); Arachne's tapestries depicting the Olympian gods as rapists and seducers, Tereus and Philomel (Book Six); Medea (Book Seven); the Calydonian boar, Baucis and Philemon (Book Eight); Hercules and the shirt of Nessus (Book Nine); Orpheus, Pygmalion, Venus and Adonis (Book Ten); Ceyx and Alcyone (Book Eleven); Ajax and Ulysses, Hecuba (Book Thirteen); the philosophy of Pythagoras, Julius Caesar (Book Fifteen). Books Twelve and Fourteen may have been the least used, but Shakespeare seems to have derived from them his knowledge of the battle of the Centaurs and Lapithae (Book Twelve, alluded to in Titus Andronicus and A Midsummer Night's Dream) and Circe's enchantments (Book Fourteen, importantly alluded to in The Comedy of Errors).

Many mythological references are of a vague character that makes it impossible to pin down a precise source for them, but the great majority of them—approximately 90 per cent—could come from Ovid, and would usually have been thought of by mythologically literate playgoers as Ovidian. Where Ovid is an obvious source, there is little point in making claims for more obscure sources (Pyramus and Thisbe is a classic instance: the play in A Mid-summer Night's Dream is supposed to be Quince's translation of Ovid, yet critics have insisted on relating it to such obscure works as Thomas Mouffet's poem Of the Silkewormes, and their Flies, which was not published and may not even have been written when the Dream was first performed). Since we know from his direct borrowings, both narrative and verbal, that Shakespeare was well versed in Ovid, we may assume that the bulk of his incidental mythological allusions derive from the Metamorphoses, unless there is proof positive of a debt to another source; the only exception to this rule is that the primary source for a particular work must take precedence, though in these cases the audience, not all of whom would have been familiar with such sources as, say, Greene's Pandosto, might still have thought of Ovid. A much smaller number of references derive from Virgil, who would have been the second most widely read author at school. The most celebrated Virgilian story is that of Dido and Aeneas, yet the image in The Merchant of Venice of 'Dido with a willow in her hand' (v. i. IO) is Ovidian rather than Virgilian—it is an adaptation of Ariadne's parting from Theseus in the tenth epistle of the Heroides, possibly mediated via Chaucer's version of this tale in his Legend of Good Women. Furthermore, as will be shown, Shakespeare's reading of The Aeneid, important as it was for Antony and Cleopatra and The Tempest, was contaminated by Ovid's reading of it in the Metamorphoses and the letter of Dido in the Heroides. In addition to the Metamorphoses and the Heroides, Shakespeare knew the Fasti—his principal direct source for Lucrece—and at least parts of the Amores, Ars Amatoria, and Tristia. As has been noted, the Fasti was not published in an English translation until 1640, so this was one work which Shakespeare could only read by making use of his 'small Latine'.

Texts such as the notoriously licentious Ars Amatoria, denounced by Stephen Gosson as 'that trumpet of Baudrie', were not of course studied in school. In the sixteenth century Ovid was condemned for his 'wantonness' as frequently as he was praised for his verbal sweetness—a mark of Shakespeare's Ovidianism is William Covell's juxtaposition, 'All praiseworthy. Lucrecia Sweet Shakespeare … Wanton Adonis.' Shakespeare lived during a period in which ways of reading Ovid underwent radical transformation, as a newly unapologetic delight in the poetic and erotic qualities of the Metamorphoses came to compete with the predominant medieval practice of moralizing and even Christianizing them. This broad shift does not, however, mean either that moral and allegorical readings disappeared in the Elizabethan period—witness Harington on Perseus and the Gorgon—or that moralization was the only medieval approach to Ovid: Chaucer provides the principal example of what might be thought of as a playful Elizabethan-style reading two hundred years before its time.

The allegorizing and moralizing of Ovid's often explicitly erotic tales was an interpretative device that enabled his poetry to retain currency and escape suppression in an age when all education and most art was dominated by the precepts of Christianity. The fourth-century Latin poet Prudentius used Ovidian allusion in his poems on Christian dogma and tales of the martyrs; his Contra Symma-chum drew together the transformation of Lot's wife into a pillar of salt and the metamorphosis of Niobe into stone, thus foreshadowing a strategy that would become common a thousand years later. Similarly, a sixth-century bishop, Venantius Fortunatus, moralized Ovid's amorous poetry by applying it to a nun's love for Christ. When John Milton in the seventeenth century converted one of Ovid's cries of post-coital bliss into the climax of a vision of Lancelot Andrewes, the late Bishop of Winchester, entering into heaven, he was doing something very traditional.

There was, then, a millennium-long tradition of reading Ovid's poems as if they were allegorical and as if their sentiments were morally elevated rather than erotically charged. The tradition was formalized and codified by the French writers of the fourteenth century who produced detailed theological elucidations of the Metamorphoses. The anonymous Ovide moralisé, a translation which introduced commentary that swelled the length of the poem to some seventy thousand lines, was the most influential work of this sort. Ovid's account of the creation was yoked to that in Genesis, Deucalion's flood to Noah's, and so on. Allegorical and biblical interpretations were set beside moral ones; thus the revolt of the giants against the Olympian gods was made to represent the building of the tower of Babel, but also the pride of any worldly human who rebels against the authority of God. Some of the interpretations of individual stories are ingenious, to say the least: Lycaon, who plotted to make Zeus eat human flesh and was turned into a wolf for his pains, is read as Herod, and his plot as the attempt on the life of the infant Jesus; his destruction of sheep is made to represent the massacre of the innocents, and his metamorphosis into a wolf, Herod's dethronement and damnation. It was this kind of reading which went into decline, though not desuetude, in the sixteenth century. In accordance with the secularization of literary texts which is one of the great characteristics of the Renaissance, allegorical translation of Ovid into biblical terms gradually became less prominent, save in the case of such powerful correspondences as the creation and the flood. George Schuler, Melanchthon's son-in-law, whose edition of 1555 (published under the name of Georgius Sabinus) was one of the most widely used, viewed allegoresis as a hermeneutical discipline of some value, but argued that sacred truth should not be mixed with pagan fable save when both agreed on historical fact. The moral interpretation, in which Lycaon represents all oppressive and cruel men, was more readily sustainable, and indeed gained new strength from the humanist emphasis on the moral wisdom of pagan culture.

Through the Ovide moralisé and such commentaries as the Metamorphosis Ovidiana moraliter … explanata, ascribed to 'Thomas Walleys' but in fact by Pierre Bersuire, the medieval conception of Ovid reached the Renaissance mythological handbooks, of which the most notable were the Mythologiae (1551) of Natalis Comes (otherwise known as Natale Conti) and Le Imagini, con la Sposinone de i Dei degli Antichi (1556) of Vincenzo Cartari. Their interpretations were condensed and rendered into the vernacular in Shakespeare's lifetime, first in Thomas Cooper's comprehensive Thesaurus (1565, frequently reprinted), then in such texts as Stephen Batman's Golden Booke of the Leaden Goddes (1577) and Abraham Fraunce's Third part of the Countesse of Pembrokes Ivychurch (1592), which contained sixteen Ovidian tales in verse and the fullest English commentary of the sixteenth century. In 1632 George Sandys published his magnificent Ovid's Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologiz 'd, and Represented in Figures, a compendium of the previous hundred years' interpretative work. Although Sandys's book was published after Shakespeare's death, it may, since it is a synthesis of earlier interpretations with many passages translated or developed from commentators such as Sabinus and Comes, be used to suggest some of the meanings which sophisticated readers and playgoers of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries would have found in Shakespeare's mythological allusions.

The plundering of the handbooks by Elizabethan writers in search of mythological elaboration is suggested by John Marston in one of his satirical poems:

Reach me some Poets Index that will show.
Imagines Deorum. Booke of Epithetes,
Natales Comes, thou I know recites,
And mak'st Anatomie of Poesie.

Shakespeare, however, went directly to Ovid rather than to the mythographies. It was the more self-consciously learned and allegorical poets, George Chapman especially, who plundered Comes. Indeed, one sense in which Chapman stood in a rival tradition to that of Shakespeare is that his Ovidianism was far more allegorical.…

Annotated editions, most of them deriving from one which first appeared in 1492 with a commentary by the great textual scholar Raphael Regius, contributed to the sixteenth-century knowledge of Ovid in England. There is in the Bodleian Library in Oxford a copy of the Aldine edition of 1502, bearing the signature 'Wm She' and a note by one 'T N' dated 1682, 'This little Booke of Ovid was given to me by W. Hall who sayd it was once Will. Shakespeares'. The testimony is questionable—'Hall' presumably refers to Shakespeare's son-in-law, but his name was John, and he died in 1635—but plausible, given the comparatively early date (Shakespearian forgery did not become a vogue until the mid-eighteenth century). With the exception of a Montaigne in the British Library, no other surviving book can plausibly be said to have belonged to Shakespeare; it is perhaps a little too convenient that the two which survive are copies of two of his favourite texts, the Metamorphoses and the Essais. The Aldine Ovid includes a life of the poet and an index of tales, as well as a good text; even if this is not Shakespeare's, he must have owned a similar edition. It is significant for the nature of Ovid's influence on Shakespeare that sixteenth-century editions tended to eschew the more elaborately allegorical form of interpretation; Sabinus was representative in suggesting that the transformation of men into beasts should be viewed metaphorically as an image of monstrous human behaviour. This implicit internalizing, which reads metamorphosis as psychological and metaphorical instead of physical and literal, is one key to Shakespeare's use of Ovid.

As important a part of the Renaissance as the multiplication of editions was the translation, the 'Englishing', of the classics. In 1560 one Thomas Howell published The Fable of Ovid treting of Narcissus, translated out of Latin into Englysh Mytre, with a Moral ther unto, an accurate translation of just under two hundred lines of Book Three of the Metamorphoses, together with nearly seven hundred lines of moralizing on Narcissus as an emblem of pride and vanity. Also in the tradition of the Ovide moralisé was Thomas Peend's The pleasant Fable of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis, published five years later; here Hermaphroditus represents youth and purity and Salmacis the allurements of the world. Peend intended to translate more of the Metamorphoses, but Arthur Golding beat him to it: his version of the first four books was published in 1565 and the whole poem two years later.

The fourteener couplet, Golding's verse form, has none of the crispness that is one of Ovid's glories. Ezra Pound exaggerated typically when he claimed [in his ABC of Reading (1934)] that the translation is 'the most beautiful book in the language', but it was undoubtedly prized by the Elizabethans. It is best when Ovid is most down to earth, as J. F. Nims implies when he writes, justly if patronizingly, of Golding 'turning the sophisticated Roman into a ruddy country gentleman with tremendous gusto, a sharp eye on the life around him, an ear for racy speech, and a gift for energetic doggerel'. Mythological figures are tricked out in sixteenth-century dress, rather as they are in the tapestries of the period—when Atalanta runs in Ovid she has bare feet and ribbons fluttering at her knees, whereas Golding gives her socks and 'embroydred garters that were tyde beneathe her ham' (Golding, x. 692). The process of 'Englishing' not just the words but also the atmosphere of Ovid is an important precedent for Shakespeare's own combinations of the native and the classical. The introduction of 'elves' in the Medea passage cited earlier is typical. Golding is characterized by his robust vernacular vocabulary—he finds no indecorum in words like 'queaches', 'plash', 'skapes', 'collup', and 'codds'—and his bustling narration of the stories, which was probably the main reason for the popularity of his translation (it was reprinted in 1575, 1584, 1587, twice in 1593, 1603, and 1612). If Shakespeare and his contemporaries owed their intimacy with Ovidian rhetoric to the grammar schools, their easy familiarity with Ovidian narrative was as much due to Golding.

In 1586 William Webbe, in his Discourse of English Poetrie, commended [in his introduction to Ovid's 'Metamorphoses': The Arthur Golding Translation (1965)],

Master Arthur Golding, for hys labour in englishing Ovids Metamorphosis, for which Gentleman surely our Country hath for many respects greatly to gyve God thankes: as for him which hath taken infinite paynes without ceasing, travelleth as yet indefatigably, and is addicted without society by his continuali laboure to profit this nation and speeche in all kind of good learning.

Webbe's emphasis on Golding's service to his country reminds us that the Elizabethan translation movement in which Golding was prominent was a significant part of a post-Reformation project to establish England as a Protestant nation with its own high culture. Golding's patron was a key figure in this early Elizabethan endeavour, the Earl of Leicester. The dedication to The Fyrst Fower Bookes, dated December 1564, praises Leicester for his encouragement of translators 'in their paynfull exercises attempted of a zeale and desyre too enryche their native language with thinges not heretoofore published in the same'. The transformation of Ovid into an English country gentleman is not just a quaint aesthetic move, as J. F. Nims implies—it fulfils the humanist requirement that 'the general end' of literary creation should be 'to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline'.

Golding stressed the morality and civic worth of his project in the prose dedication to Leicester. The complete translation of 1567 had a fuller verse epistle, also addressed to Leicester, which expounded Ovid's 'dark Philosophie of turned shapes' in a manner which goes back to the Ovide moralisé. A number of traditional interpretations are followed, as Ovid is reconciled with the Bible: 'Not only in effect he dooth with Genesis agree, But also in the order of creation, save that hee Makes no distinction of the dayes' … Golding does not commit himself as to whether Ovid is 'following of the [biblical] text aright' or unconsciously recognizing 'that there are no Gods but one'.… The Golden Age is compared to 'Adams tyme in Paradyse' … and Deucalion's flood to Noah's, but once Golding's exposition gets beyond the first book, interpretations of this kind give way to moral ones, in accordance with common sixteenth-century practice. Medieval allegoresis is replaced by a humanist emphasis on the ethical exemplariness of the classic text. Thus, much of the Epistle consists of select moralizations of tales from the second book onwards: Daphne is 'A myrror of virginitie'… Phaëthon 'ambition blynd, and youthfull wilfulnesse' … Narcissus 'scornfulnesse and pryde' … Pyramus and Thisbe 'The headie force of frentick love whose end is wo and payne' … and so forth.

Golding's Epistle probably constituted Shakespeare's only sustained direct confrontation with the moralizing tradition—that is, if he bothered to read it and did not skip straight to the English text of his admired Ovid. The Epistle may certainly be said to have provided a convenient embodiment of the interpretations of major myths that Shakespeare and his audience would have shared. The interpretative tradition should not, however, be over-stressed: in the second half of the sixteenth century the Metamorphoses was being read as much for its wit as its wisdom. Golding himself spoke in his 'Preface too the Reader' of Ovid's 'lyvely Image[s]' and 'pleasant style'.… The poem had an energetic life as a linguistic resource that could not be contained by the work of moralization.

The momentum of the translation movement was such that the Elizabethans soon tried their hand at Englishing Ovid's other works: George Turbervile's The Heroycall Epistles of the Learned Poet P. Ovidius Naso Translated into English Verse appeared in the same year as Golding's complete Metamorphoses, Thomas Underdowne translated the Invective against Ibis two years later, together with notes that formed a compendium of mythological reference, and in 1572 Thomas Churchyard produced a version of the first three books of the Tristia. Turbervile's Heroides, an attempt to make 'A Romaine borne to speake with English jawes', went through four editions before the end of the century. It brought a further series of mythological love-stories into the vernacular, strengthened the link between the Ovidian tradition and the medieval convention of the despairing lover's 'complaint', and eventually inspired an extremely popular English imitation, Michael Drayton's England's Heroicall Epistles of 1597, which took the form of exchanges of letters between famous couples from English history. By the time Drayton was writing, another translation, Marlowe's version of the Amores, was circulating in manuscript and being produced in surreptitious editions. By the 1590s then, Ovid had become for many writers, readers, and playgoers a source of poetic and even licentious delight rather than moral edification. The apogee of the new Ovidianism was constituted by the genre which modern critics call epyllion, the erotic narrative poetry, influenced by both the Heroides and parts of the Metamorphoses, that flourished in the 1590s and of which Marlowe's Hero and Leander and Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis … are the pre-eminent examples. In this erotic tradition, Ovid became once again what he described himself as in the Ars Amatoria (ii. 497), 'lascivi praeceptor amoris', the preceptor of wanton love. And with this development, the wheel turned full circle to Augustus' proscription of the poet: in 1599 Marlowe's Amores were banned and burned by episcopal order. Late-Elizabethan Ovidian eroticism was distinctly difficult to reconcile with the humanist conviction that the classics should be translated because of their moral worth.