Shakespeare and the idea of metamorphosis

This study attempts to discover what is comprehended by the title of Ovid's Metamorphoses and what it was about this narrative poem which Shakespeare found so congenial. The opening chapters explore the variety and coherence of Ovid's theme, whilst ranging widely over Shakespeare's poems and plays and elucidating the Renaissance context in which the poem was received. Consideration is given to the way Ovid and Shakespeare place human action in an interpretative context of the natural world. It is argued that natural settings and natural imagery condition both the presentation of and our response to the marvelous events which occur in the fictions of both poets. A further fundamental continuity between Ovid and Shakespeare is their concern with language and the imagination as transforming media which dynamically influence human perception. The connection between metaphor and metamorphosis is examined, and it is argued that the triad of lunatic, lover, and poet is as significant in the Metamorphoses as it is in Shakespeare's plays from A Midsummer Night's Dream to The Tempest. Ovid's use of language was of considerable consequence in the Renaissance. However, this study suggests that, for Shakespeare, the most important rhetorical quality of Ovid was his view of literature and society. Thus an important aim is to relate Ovid's perception of the artist's role, and the relationship between poet and poem, poem and reader, which the Metamorphoses establishes, to the aesthetic character of individual Shakespearean works and to Shakespeare's developing perception of his role as a theatre poet. The second part of the study is a close consideration of three plays - As You Like It, All's Well That Ends Well, and Antony and Cleopatra - in the light of the critical context established in the opening chapters. Attention is given to Shakespeare's engagement with problems of authorial intention and critical interpretation (a word which also means translation), and the motif of Ovid's banishment is seen as central to the dramatist's examination of the licensed affective attitude of 'as you like it'. A contrast is made between the moralist's demand for fixed and singular denotation and meaning, and the imaginative artist's exploitation of linguistic ambiguity and change. Here Florio and Montaigne serve as foils to Ovid, and it is argued that Shakespeare's 'idea of metamorphosis is increasingly manifest as a desire to find a form of imaginative fiction which can match the rich variety of the natural world and keep time with its changes. Like the Metamorphoses, the text of All's Well is deliberately left 'unsealed'. Similarly, Antony and Cleopatra is a truly aleatory work whose meaning can only be realized in 'performance' - an ambiguous word which, as used in these plays, also reflects Shakespeare's willingness to follow Ovid in accepting the risks incurred by the full expression of human sexuality.