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Summary

Christopher Marlowe was the boldest of the Elizabethan Ovidians and, moreover, the first Elizabethan to translate all of Ovid’s bold erotic elegies into English and, further, to infuse his own poetry and plays with what he saw as the combustible core of Ovid’s boldness in the erotic elegies, or Amores. This chapter establishes Marlowe’s iconoclasm and supposed exceptionalism as a model for his peers and colleagues to adopt and adapt. For Marlowe, Ovidian allusion involves a challenge to change, adapt, and innovate. This is the poetic model that Marlowe employed in his verse and plays such as Tamburlaine, Edward II, and Doctor Faustus and, moreover, the model he passed along to his colleagues and followers.

The range of poetic invention that occurred in Renaissance English literature was vast, from the lyric eroticism of the late sixteenth century to the rise of libertinism in the late seventeenth century. Heather James argues that Ovid, as the poet-philosopher of literary innovation and free speech, was the galvanizing force behind this extraordinary level of poetic creativity. Moving beyond mere topicality, she identifies the ingenuity, novelty and audacity of the period's poetry as the political inverse of censorship culture. Considering Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, Milton and Wharton among many others, the book explains how free speech was extended into the growing domain of English letters, and thereby presents a new model of the relationship between early modern poetry and political philosophy.

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Chapter 2 - Loving Ovid

Summary

Ovid and the Liberty of Speech in Shakespeare's England

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2 results

Chapter 2 - Loving Ovid

Summary

Ovid and the Liberty of Speech in Shakespeare's England