Lindsay Ann Reid, Shakespeare’s Ovid and the Spectre of the Medieval. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer. 2018. xiii + 267pp. ISBN: 9781843845188. £60 hardback.

In one of many startling scenes in Titus Andronicus (1594), the audience witnesses the mutilated Lavinia chasing her schoolboy nephew onto the stage, as she reaches for his copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Lavinia famously uses Lucius’ book to reveal to her family how she has been ‘ravished and wronged as Philomela was’ (4.1.52).[1] Counter to the educative programme of Renaissance humanism, Metamorphoses here acts as a negative exemplar: life has copied art to effect violation, not improvement. This self-conscious moment has become a touchstone in accounts of Shakespearean, indeed English, Ovidianism. Yet, as Lindsay Ann Reid argues in this highly impressive study, the scene should be ‘categorised as exceptional rather than emblematic of Shakespeare’s typical allusions to and engagements with “Ovidian” mythological poetry’ (209; Reid’s italics). Unlike the direct connection to the Latin source suggested in Titus, Shakespeare’s engagements are characteristically filtered through, and haunted by, his encounters with the vernacular medieval literature of Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower. His Ovidianism is also haunted by spectres of the interpretive traditions that pertain to those writers’ own classicism. Reid builds case studies around The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1591), The Taming of the Shrew (1593), ‘The Rape of Lucrece’ (1594), Romeo and Juliet (1597), and Twelfth Night (1601). These sections are bookended by analyses of two Ovidian volumes: the anonymous Chaucer’s Ghoast (1672), and the Aldine Latin Metamorphoses (1502), that may have been Shakespeare’s personal copy.  

The most striking and substantial aspect of this book is Reid’s adept ability to bring together and move between three major literary traditions, those of ancient Rome, medieval Europe and early modern England. With this endeavour she is consciously interrogating and entwining what she sees as two separate strands of Shakespeare criticism. On one hand are landmark studies including Jonathan Bate’s Shakespeare and Ovid (1993), works that read the playwright against the influence of his Latin predecessor. On the other is a trajectory, currently experiencing an efflorescence, that positions Shakespeare among his medieval forerunners, particularly Chaucer. In this alternative line, though, works such as Love, History, and Emotion in Chaucer and Shakespeare: “Troilus and Criseyde” and “Troilus and Cressida”, edited by Andrew James Johnston (et al.) tend to focus on a narrow group of plays. Beyond Troilus and Cressida, this selection usually includes The Two Noble Kinsmen (1613) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1600). Reid’s intervention is twofold. She persuasively complicates our understanding of the relationship between Shakespeare and Ovid, which is frequently discussed in the context of humanist schooling. She also spotlights the hefty role that Gower played in shaping early modern Ovidianism.

Gower appears throughout this study in ways that should focus the attention of early modernists. Hailed as the leading Ovidian of the middle ages, and with his Confessio Amantis (from 1386) recognised as one of the largest repositories of ancient legend in medieval literature, Gower had a ‘celebrity’ (24) that is virtually neglected in current scholarship of the early modern period. This is all the more surprising given Richard Hillman’s claim in 1985 that Gower’s role in Pericles (1607) is ‘the most sustained literary allusion to be found in Shakespeare’.[2] To give the Shakespeare effect its due, it is via Pericles that many early modernists encounter Gower. From Reid’s sightline, this general critical dispossession is one instance of the process by which medieval Ovidianism is erased from Shakespeare Studies.

This book asks readers to recognise that Ovid’s early modern presence is haunted by medieval revenants. Citing Spectres of Marx (1993), her vocabulary draws on the spectropoetics of Jacques Derrida, where the ghost is a metaphor to examine legacy and genesis. Like the spectre’s defiance of the laws of time, Reid’s literary history is non-linear, resulting in ‘a transhistorical, polyvocal, and multilingual conglomerate of interests’ (4). That Reid is implicitly in dialogue with recent formulations of early modern medievalism by Helen Barr (Transporting Chaucer, 2014), and archaism by Lucy Munro (Archaic Style in English Literature, 1590-1674, 2013), suggests the richness of an approach that goes beyond deperiodisation to queer temporality.

During the five central chapters, alongside discussions of familiar literary features such as the dream vision and ekphrasis, a range of lesser-explored tropes and forms come under Reid’s scrutiny: the parade of resurrected figures; the ghost author; the alba. Chapter one, ‘Chaucer’s Ghoast, Ovid’s “Pleasant Fables”, and the Spectre of Gower’, discusses a barely-treated collection of Ovidian ‘Fables’, as the title page calls them. Functioning as an extended introduction, this chapter sets out Reid’s conceptualisation of the spectre as a metaphor for transhistorical literary connections. While an unreliable title page may try to obscure Gower behind Chaucer, the book’s original audiences had ‘greater awareness of intermediary, vernacular precedents […] and their interpretative legacies than is commonly acknowledged’ (38).

In chapter two, ‘Shakespeare’s Ovid and Sly’s Chaucer’, Reid attends to the induction of the Taming of the Shrew alongside Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess (1368). The Shrew’s significance as a site of Shakespeare’s Ovidianism inheres in its parody of Tudor pedagogical practice (Cambio teaching Bianca her Latin), and in the trope of metamorphosis, first described ekphrastically in the induction and then modelled in the play. Building on this position, Reid argues that the play’s Ovidianism is inflected by the mode of dream vision and particularly Chaucer’s poem. Especially useful here is her application of the model of the polyptych both to the structure of the Book of the Duchess and to Shakespeare’s play. This idea invites further development around the implications for particular characters, Katherine in particular.

If Reid’s ideas sometimes suggest lines of enquiry rather than fully explore their implications, this may well result from the breadth and persuasiveness of her many examples. In the third chapter, ‘Theseus and Ariadne (and her Sister)’, the focus turns to The Two Noble Kinsmen and its sources in the Heroides as refracted through late medieval poetry. The analysis reveals postclassical alterations to the myth which heighten the reputation of Theseus as an oath-breaker and, at the same time, add in Phaedra to explain the oath-breaker’s abandonment of Ariadne. The chapter convincingly extends Reid’s argument that Shakespeare’s writings show him reading not just texts but traditions. While the evidence in this section is occasionally dizzying for the reader, the scholarship that juggles several historical contexts, alongside a triple layering of literary history, is here displayed to fine effect. 

Chapter four, ‘Philomela and the Dread of Dawn’, makes a compelling and complicated series of intertextual arguments extending across four central texts: Amores 1.13, Troilus and Criseyde, ‘The Rape of Lucrece’, and Romeo and Juliet. Reid’s position is that in Shakespeare’s narrative poem and his tragedy there are mingled allusions to Amores 1.13, but these references to Ovid are haunted by the interpretive legacy of Troilus and Criseyde’s dawn songs. In addition to this, the heritage of Chaucer’s albas in his romance blends Ovid with a separate set of conventional medieval literary tropes into which Gower later also intervenes. The resultant complexity of the close readings demands much of this chapter’s reader. It is a mark, however, of Reid’s skill as a literary analyst and the quality of her elucidation that she can forge rather than hack a path through this dense textuality.      

The effect of chapter four is to demonstrate the intricate power of poetry to create a flickering web of connections between texts. Sometimes these links are overt. They can function, for example, through emblems like the nightingale, or shared questions. For Reid, Troilus and Criseyde and ‘The Rape of Lucrece’ invite readers to consider the extent of a woman’s culpability if she is forced to ‘relinquish her body’ (150), yet keeps a spotless mind. In other instances, poetry provokes subtextual anxieties that barely register at the linguistic or symbolic level but conspire, in the right literary circumstances, to create undecidable moments with disturbing effects. Thus, in chapter four’s central discussion, Reid describes a very fine line ‘between Chaucerian-Ovidian rape and Chaucerian-Ovidian romance’ (161).

In ‘The Cross-dressed Narcissus’, this study’s final chapter, Reid explores allusions to Narcissus in Twelfth Night’s exchanges between Olivia and Viola (cross-dressed as Cesario). Shakespeare here draws on not only the Metamorphoses but a medieval tradition emerging from Confessio Amantis. Narcissus is infamously often invoked as the supreme warning against excessive and misguided self-love. His additional status as a figure for homoerotic desire makes him particularly evocative within the swirling identifications of lovers and twins in Shakespeare’s comedy. Yet Gower’s poem inaugurates an alternative Narcissus who believes his fatal reflection in the pool to be a beautiful woman. This version ‘left its mark on English literature for the next two centuries: the tradition of the heteronormative, cognitively erroneous Narcissus who falls in love with a female illusion’ (172). Chapter five has broad potential to inform discussions of women on the stage. As Reid points out, ‘Olivia’s misdirected passion for a phantom “boy” […] serves as a potent metatheatrical reminder that, as with any Shakespearean comedy, this is a play that was written to include multiple phantom ‘women’ in performance’ (198).

Readers looking for a synthesising conclusion will find instead an ‘Afterword’ that precedes two appendices. Appendix one, ‘The Gowerian Riddles of Chaucer’s Ghoast’, supplements the first chapter; it details the clues to the hidden Gowerian source of the ‘Chaucerian’ material. Appendix two, ‘Ariadne’s Desertion in Bulleins Bullwarke of Defence’, is a useful reprint of material not otherwise available in a modern edition. This extract from William Bullien’s 1562 medical dialogue contains a version of Ariadne’s abandonment by Theseus. Following recent chapters by Phil Whithington and Jane Griffiths there is increasing attention to this physician-author, which Reid’s treatment should help to advance.[3]  

This is a work of great erudition and inventiveness. Consequently, the chapters are required to lay extensive ground before constructing their core argument. On occasion readers may also feel they have to work to submit to the logic of Reid’s unconventional structuring, with certain key pieces of information, such as plot summaries, coming later than readers might expect. However, there is pleasure in the unexpected, as Reid amply demonstrates.

While Spenser himself is mentioned in passing only, the book’s core premise – that the literary return to antiquity traverses rather than skips over the middle ages – is of great relevance to Spenserians. This will assist our understanding of Spenser’s engagement with Ovid and his other key Roman model, Virgil. Moreover, this study’s attention to Gower should prompt more thought about that poet’s influence on Spenser, something that remains, as R.F. Yeager wrote in The Spenser Encyclopedia in 1990, ‘an open question’.[4] Reid’s important and demanding monograph will be of benefit well beyond the Spenser community, informing classicists, medievalists, early modernists and those interested in the complexities of influence. Readers will learn both from its skillful readings, and from its superb demonstration of the ways in which literary inheritance operates over time and between traditions.

Rachel Stenner

University of Sussex

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