This chapter turns to the comic counterpart of Romeo and Juliet, written about the same time with as deep an engagement with Ovid. Dream, however, marks Shakespeare’s shift to thinking about Ovid’s bold, parrhesiastic verse and voice through the Metamorphoses rather than the Amores. Shakespeare taps Ovid’s poem of changes and changed bodies as his own, parallel contribution to the animated and parrhesiastic theater of his day, following and paralleling Marlowe. The chapter explores the trail-blazing path that Shakespeare’s Ovidian girls, Hermia and Helena, make in their pursuit of a dual goal: bold speech and marriage to the man of their desires. The dual goals are incompatible, as the chapter reveals. And so the Athenian and deeply Ovidian girls of the play hand the torch of parrhesiastic speech over to the artisan-actors, who perform the play within the play and participate in the huge send-up that Shakespeare’s acting troupe provides for those members of its aristocratic audience who have no respect for the craftsmen also in attendance to this play and others like it.

This chapter introduces the concept of parrhesia (licentia in Latin) and, in particular, its hitherto unexplored relationship to the idea of poetic license (also licentia in Latin). It further establishes the pivotal, galvanizing role played by Ovid, the boldest poet of the Augustan age, in passing down to early modern English writers the model and theory of poetic indecorum as a form of political resistance. It finally considers the role played by Augustus’s banishment of the poet, Ovid, in the history of early modern English poetry and political thought.