This, of course, doesn’t explain why Ovid, more than Virgil or any other classical writer, was popular. The answer to that question seems to be, very surprisingly, that medieval writers interpreted metamorphoses as a collection of allegories, both moral allegories in general and specifically Christian allegories. You’ll remember back in the early lectures of the course, I said that the allegorical interpretation of myth has had a very long run for its money.
It’s been a very popular interpretation of myth from antiquity onwards. And certainly this is what we see with the treatment of metamorphoses in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. In fact, by the 14th century A.D., the allegorical use of Ovid reached its high point in an anonymous French verse poem of 70,000 verses entitled Ovid Morrise.
Ovid interpreted as moral exempla, more or less. In this work, the flight of Daedalus and his son Icarus was interpreted as representing the soul’s flight towards God. Daedalus, you’ll remember, was the great artisan, the craftsman who constructed the labyrinth in which the minotaur was kept imprisoned.
Later in his story, Daedalus himself and his son Icarus were imprisoned by Minos and made their escape by making wings for themselves and flying away from the island of Crete. Daedalus fashioned these wings by gathering feathers from seabirds, making wax forms that he fitted to his own and his son’s arms, warming the wax, impressing the feathers into it, and then he and Icarus could fly.
Daedalus warned his son not to fly too near to the sun or the heat would melt the wax and the feathers would drop off his arms, not to fly too low or the moisture from the sea would make the feathers heavy and pull him down, but to fly in the middle path. Icarus flew too near to the sun, the wax melted, he fell into the sea and was drowned. Now there are undoubtedly many allegorical ways to interpret that myth.
I suppose the most obvious one is that it’s a representation of the Delphic maxim, nothing in excess, keep to the middle way, but in the book Ovid Moralise in the 14th century, it was seen as representing the soul’s flight towards God. Perhaps even more surprisingly and certainly more specifically Christian in allegory was the way this work read the tale of Daphne and Apollo. Daphne was seen in her purity, her rejection of sexuality, as representing the Virgin Mary.
So Ovid was used in this time period as a source of allegory that was seen as being specifically Christian most of the time and the rest of the time at least very, very moral. An odd twist of fate for Ovid who, as we saw in the last lecture, was so ironic and urbane and sophisticated a writer that he should be used as a source of completely unironic allegory as a source of moral instruction for youth, but that is how he was used.
By the 14th century, when Ovid Moralise was written, Ovid was also becoming well-known in England in his Latin original. And students who went to grammar schools in England learned to read Latin. That’s why grammar schools were called grammar schools, because that was where students studied Latin grammar.
When we move on into the 15th century, William Caxton published the first English translation of Metamorphoses in 1480. Caxton worked from a French translation. He worked both directly from the Latin and from a French translation and he included morals or allegorical interpretations and explanations of the stories in Ovid. So Caxton’s translation was really a translation plus commentary and reflected the same assumption that we saw in the earlier Ovid Moralize that Ovid’s main use is as a source of morals and allegories and that interpreting those as part of what the translator should do for his audience.
But with Caxton’s translation, obviously, Ovid became available to more English readers because now even those who did not know Latin could read Ovid in English. For English literature and culture, however, the crucial point about Ovid is reached with Ovid’s influence on Shakespeare.
Shakespeare clearly knew metamorphoses very, very well indeed. He knew it backwards and forwards. It permeates Shakespeare’s work to an extent that can hardly be exaggerated.
We don’t know the details of Shakespeare’s education. We know very, very little about Shakespeare’s life, but if he studied at the Stratford Grammar School, there was a grammar school in Stratford, so if Shakespeare was one of the students there, we simply don’t know whether he was or not, he would have read Ovid in the original Latin as a schoolboy. He probably also used, as a grown man, the translation of 1567 done by Golding, which was a very, very popular book in England in the late 16th century.
Whether Shakespeare took his Ovid directly from the Latin or whether he worked mostly or even entirely from Golding’s translation, Metamorphoses permeates Shakespeare’s works to an absolutely extraordinary extent. It’s almost as though Metamorphoses is the text lying behind Shakespeare on just about every page of just about every play.
When Shakespeare wants a point of comparison, when he wants something to use as a metaphor or a simile or a more general kind of comparison, one of Ovid’s stories in Metamorphoses seems to be the first thing that springs to his mind in a very great number of cases. And it has always seemed to me particularly in teaching modern American college students, that this is a large part of what makes Shakespeare difficult for modern readers. People often think that the difficulty of Shakespeare lies in his language. I don’t think so.