Ovid and the Liberty of Speech in Shakespeare’s England. By Heather James

Abstract

Heather James, by examining a number of Tudor- and Stuart-era authors through the twin lenses of Ovidian reception and early modern concerns about autocratic pressure on literary expression, offers an intriguing perspective on the period’s restless ferment of poetry and political philosophy. Through a series of close readings of selected works by Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson, James focuses on Ovid as both these authors’ inspiration and, more daringly, the springboard for their own potentially perilous verses about speech and silence in a wider world inescapably overshadowed by the authority of the Crown. The towering status of Ovid in early modern English literature is of course well-established in scholarship; what James does is argue for a better appreciation of Ovid’s importance for the political ramifications of poetic work. After a somewhat desultory introduction, James considers Spenser in her first chapter, “Flower Power: Political Discontents in Spenser’s Flowerbeds.” She begins to build her theme of Ovidian influence not by choosing an overtly political work, but by taking “the counterintuitive position that Spenser is in fact deeply political when he invites his readers to wallow and get lost in lush flowerbeds of poetry” (20). James posits that when Spenser indulges in long, descriptive floral catalogues that seem to have no relation to external politics, he is in fact offering an escape from such politics with a “poetic aromatherapy” (21) of blooms “all flagrantly irrelevant to moral use or political encomium” (27). The heart of the chapter is a close reading of Muiopotmos, or the Fate of the Butterflie: in it, the butterfly Clarion flutters through a lush garden, but is killed by the spider Aragnoll, who embodies “the darker passions of the court and Crown, namely Envy” (40)—for in Spenser, Aragnoll is the son of Arachne. In a “seismic change” (43), however, Spenser’s Arachne deviates from her Ovidian predecessor by spontaneously becoming a spider due to her envy of Athena’s art. Spenser’s confection of a poem becomes in James’s reading a metaphor for reading for pleasure and “an ideal of imaginative and expressive freedoms” that is ultimately “a gorgeous but doomed fantasy” (50).