TY - JOUR
AU - Suthren, Carla
AB - There has been no shortage of scholarship on the reception of Ovid in Shakespeare and his contemporaries, so it is no small achievement for Heather James to produce a monograph in this area which feels as bold and fresh as this one does. In fact, the critical ‘Ovidian Renaissance’ (James quotes Maureen Quilligan [6]) works in her favour, since she has no need to waste time convincing her readership that Ovid’s ‘poetic example permeated the educational curriculum, models of rhetoric, concepts of gender and sexuality, and theories of the material world even before it made its full impact on poetry and poetic forms’ (5). Instead, she introduces us to a slightly different early modern Ovid from the one we are used to. This is an Ovid read backwards in the light of his exile by Augustus in 8AD, interpreted as at least in part a sentence passed on his refusal to ‘suppress … the libertie of his verse’ (in the words of George Sandys). As a result, James argues, ‘Ovid played a significant role in early modern political thought about the rule of law, the liberties of the subject, and the liberty of speech’ (13). This brings us to the second part of James’ title. ‘Liberty of Speech’ broadly translates the Greek parrhesia or licentia in Latin. Licentia is particularly appropriate for thinking about Ovid’s poetry, since it encapsulates both the positive meaning and the more negative connotations of ‘licentiousness’. Yet although James frequently uses the Latin term throughout her text, it does not replace or supplant the Greek parrhesia. The reason for this is the on-going relevance of the Greek concept: Ovid’s generation under Augustus looks back on the parrhesia prized by Greek democracy from a distance and struggles to translate it. And in James’ argument, ‘Ovid’s great contribution to political thought in the English Renaissance was his conception of poetry as a site in which parrhesia could persist even within the limiting structures of empire’ (7). James leaves her introduction deliberately brief, with the result that such theorizing tends to remain implicit. This can occasionally result in the feeling that we have wandered rather a long way from the core meanings of parrhesia—it is not completely clear, for instance, in what sense Juliet is really telling Romeo ‘to speak parrhesiastically’ at 2.2.85–94, as James claims (117). In general, however, James’ argument emerges compellingly and very satisfyingly from her five chapters, which take an author-based approach, focussing respectively on Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Jonson, with an epilogue on Milton and the lesser-known Anne Wharton. James offers fresh and rewarding close readings of even her most familiar material, as well as spending time with works that have attracted less attention, such as Spenser’s delightful ‘Muiopotmos’, and introducing a neglected female author in Wharton. Although James embraces the likelihood that many readers will approach her book in parts according to their interests, there is much to reward those who take it as a whole. Marlowe’s notorious banned translations of the Amores, for example, resurface in Shakespeare’s own ‘reckonings with Marlowe’, and again in Jonson’s Poetaster, where when Ovid speaks his own verse, it is in Marlowe’s words. Threads of other kinds can also be traced through: those who share James’ interest in the material forms of early modern printed books will find a discussion of the first and second quartos of Romeo and Juliet in Chapter three and close attention to the printed commonplace marks in Poetaster in Chapter five. In both instances, James demonstrates the value of combining such approaches with literary interpretation. In the case of Romeo and Juliet, examining ‘the greater presence of Ovid in the later quarto’ (107) offers a welcome supplement to the on-going debates over the nature of the so-called ‘good’ and ‘bad’ quartos (labels which are now rarely found unqualified in the wild). The discussion of Jonson’s deployment of gnomic sentences and printed commonplace marks is illuminating from a literary perspective and produces some very helpful analysis of the nature of Renaissance sententiae. This discussion also invites questions about what else might be contributing under the surface to early modern conceptions of parrhesia. In an aside, James comments that when Mecoenas in Poetaster ‘reflects on the dangerous alliance of the prince and detractor as generic types without a location in time and space’, he is speaking ‘like a tragic chorus’ (215). The lines in question are highlighted by commonplace marks; if we take into account that the use of commonplace marks in printed drama originated in early modern editions of Greek tragedy (examples of which were owned by Jonson himself), then this connection may not seem quite so casual. Similarly, Greek parrhesia was of great importance to Milton, and it would be interesting to explore how this might interact with James’ reading of his distinctively Ovidian ‘Republican Eve’ in the epilogue. This is all to say that James has opened up a fertile seam here, which should attract further conversations in this area. Taken as a whole, James’ book enacts an approach to classical reception studies which gets beyond traditional source study without becoming unhelpfully diffuse—something which is more often aspired to than achieved in practice. Direct and specific uses of Ovid are not lacking in James’ early modern material, of course, but these form part of a wider tapestry in which Ovidian licentia persuasively colours areas even where Ovid may not be visibly present. Moreover, using Ovid to illuminate the poetic outpourings of the English Renaissance, James’ study of her early modern material collectively develops an important dimension of how we read Ovid. Additionally, James gives this collaborative transhistorical project of reading Ovid a strong sense of urgency: ‘When we read, interpret, adapt, and invent, we put our breath into poems whose existence very much depends on our participation and our belief in the power of breath and speech to oppose arbitrary rule’ (15). Wearing its extensive research and classical erudition lightly, this book certainly manages to breathe new life into old poems. © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/pages/standard-publication-reuse-rights) © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com
TI - Heather James. Ovid and the Liberty of Speech in Shakespeare’s England
JF - The Review of English Studies
DO - 10.1093/res/hgac074
DA - 2022-11-25
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/heather-james-ovid-and-the-liberty-of-speech-in-shakespeare-s-england-Ac8aVLs3M7
SP - 177
EP - 179
VL - 74
IS - 313
DP - DeepDyve
ER -