Agnès Lafont (ed.), Shakespeare’s Erotic Mythology and Ovidian Renaissance Culture

Abstract

THIS essay collection explores Shakespeare’s Ovidian and erotic subject matter with an eye to ‘classical and continental aesthetic contexts’, examining ‘how Shakespeare screens and sifts erotic mythology to offer personal readings of the classical tales’ (1; 3). The studies included in this volume draw on ‘exchanges between different aesthetic media’, from visual depictions of erotic myth in fountains, paintings, and needlework to dramatic adaptations of classical material by Marlowe and Shakespeare (7). The volume thus builds on a substantial corpus of work on the reception of Ovid and erotic mythology in the Renaissance, including the seminal work by Jonathan Bate, and more recent studies and essay collections prepared by Liz Oakley-Brown, Goran V. Stanivukovic, and A. B. Taylor.1 The chapters included in this volume offer a rich variety of approaches and interpretive frameworks. With the close attention it pays to lexical nuance, Marguerite Tassi’s essay on Macbeth makes for persuasive and engaging reading. Building on Macduff’s description of Duncan’s corpse as ‘a new Gorgon’ (2.3.66), Tassi understands the play as a reworking of the Gorgon myth, whose gaze transfixes and enraptures characters and audience alike. Here the textual and historical evidence is tightly packed and there is rarely a sentence that does not pull its argumentative weight. The editor too appears to appreciate that this is a stand-out chapter, awarding it a subsection of its very own (‘Deadly Rapture’). Ilaria Andreoli’s piece on ‘Ovid’s Meta-metamorphosis’, which focuses on the woodcuts and illustrations which furnished early editions of the Metamorphoses, offers some thoughtful insights into the censorship and reproduction of such material. From the vignettes of the 1497 Giunta edition to the engravings by Pieter de Jode of 1606, Andreoli deftly guides the reader through these visual responses to Ovidian myth across the Renaissance. François Laroque’s chapter on ‘Erotic Fancy/Fantasy’ considers Shakespeare’s excitement and subsequent frustration of the erotic in his audience. Laroque produces some detailed close-readings of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Antony and Cleopatra, fruitfully comparing the prologue from Henry V to the ‘rhetorical strategy’ at work in Shakespeare’s flirtation with sexual fantasy (62). The volume includes in addition a series of exquisite plates, from the plasterwork frieze of Diana, the Huntress at Hardwick Hall to Andrea Del Sarto’s Saint John the Baptist, allowing the reader to engage with some of the most important visual responses to Ovidian myth highlighted by this collection.