Arte e contagio morale da Ovidio a Shakespeare

Abstract

Throughout the section of the Remedia amoris where Ovid puts the unhappy ‘convalescent’ lover on guard against the danger of relapse (609-794), the author links the aetiological motif of erotic and ophthalmic infection (613-616) to the negative effects of the theatre and love poetry on spectators and readers (751-766). In the same way, in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, an eye infection is said to have caused Olivia to fall in love with Viola/Cesario (1, 5, 313-317). This lovesickness may also recall the Puritan prejudice against the theatre, since the pseudo-page ‘performs’ a dialogue version of Orsino’s protestation of love for the self-centred countess, who will in the end marry the disguised girl’s twin. The erotic poison therefore turns out to be the antidote for a long narcissistic lethargy: here is the English dramatist’s answer to detractors of the theatre. Once again, it is possible to find a parallel in Ovid, who forbids the ‘patient’ on the way to recovery to read Ovid’s own elegiac couplets (i. e., the metre in which the Remedia are written): rather than blaming himself, however, the master of remedies prefers instead to laugh at himself as having created a form of elegy that has been stripped of the erotic preoccupations of his predecessors and is only seemingly harmful.