Locus amoenus or locus violens? Shakespearean Emotions Expressed Through an Ovidian Model

Abstract

Many Shakespearean critics discuss points of similarity with Ovid, and, like Jonathan Bate, I suggest that Ovid and Shakespeare share ‘an interest above all else in human psychology, particularly the psychology of desire in its many varieties; the transformations wrought by the extremes of emotion’.1 The locus amoenus is an example of a textual space depicting an idealized landscape which is used to facilitate exploration of the boundaries of human emotion and desire. Despite differences between Metamorphoses and Titus Andronicus, I aim to show that the idea driving Shakespeare’s sinister revision of the locus amoenus is, in fact, Ovidian in origin. The concept of a sometimes ambiguous ‘pleasant place’ in Ovid’s practice acts specifically as a topos through which to explore emotional excess leading to fundamental, often violent, transformations of the self and indeed the pleasant place. After briefly exploring how Ovid reinvigorated the locus amoenus I turn to Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus,2 where the connotations of a wood, superficially ‘amoenus’ but in fact ‘violens’, are radically remodelled and even undercut. The setting provides Shakespeare with a dramatic context in which the raw, defining antagonisms and conflicts pervading the play are clarified, come to a head and are augmented.