The archaic language is fairly easy to get past. I think the difficulty of Shakespeare lies in the fact that he makes so many allusions to things that are meaningless to modern readers. And I can give you one example to serve
for all of the examples in Shakespeare. In her great second balcony speech, when Juliet is waiting for Romeo to come join her for their wedding night, she opens the speech with a mythological reference.
Just to remind you of where we are in the play at this point, Romeo and Juliet have secretly been married. Romeo has murdered Juliet’s cousin Tybalt and therefore has been banished from Verona. Juliet is waiting for him to come join her for what they know will probably be their one and only night together. And she’s standing on her balcony waiting for night to fall.
And this is what she says, the first three lines of her speech. Now, when I teach mythology, to college students. I always recite that speech the first day of class and ask them if they know what it means and almost without exception they haven’t a clue what it means. I might as well be saying blah blah blah. I then tell them the story of Phaeton and enjoy watching their faces wide up and their heads nod and understanding when I recite Juliet’s lines again.
If you know the story of Phaeton you realize that Juliet is saying, in effect, that she doesn’t care if the entire world is destroyed. She doesn’t care if every other living creature dies that very night. She wants Romeo and she wants him as soon as possible, and of course there’s more at work in this image even than that there’s a resonance of Juliet referring to the eager passionate ardent young doomed teenager Phaeton when she herself is an eager passionate ardent young doomed teenager the death of Phaeton that anyone who has read ovid knows is inevitable in the story of the wagoner Phaeton whipping the horses to the west the death of Phaeton prefigures the deaths of Romeo and Juliet themselves.
It’s an image that works on all sorts of levels and it is an extraordinarily powerful way for Juliet to begin her speech describing her desire for night to come in immediately and bring her Romeo. But if you haven’t read Ovid or if you haven’t read classical myth, it falls about as flat as anything possibly could fall.
This is, as I said, just one example out of Shakespeare. There are many, many others. And since Shakespeare’s influence on English literature is incalculably great, I think it’s fair to say that Ovid’s influence on English literature through Shakespeare is also incalculably great. Now, Ovid is only one author, granted.
But he can stand as a representative of the enormous influence that classical mythology in general has had and continues to have on later Western civilization, both European and American. Authors have taken and continue to take themes, images, plots, characters, points of comparison from Homer, from Virgil, from the tragedians, from many other classical authors, as well as from Ovid.
And since these ancient authors’ subject matter was, as we’ve seen throughout this course, if not directly myth, then at least permeated with myth, that means later authors who draw upon the ancient authors are inevitably drawing upon those same myths for their plots, characters, points of comparison, and so forth. Sometimes a modern author will make this obvious through the title of a work. When James Joyce calls his novel Ulysses, he’s giving us a clue that it is in some way a reworking of the story of Odysseus, whose name in Latin was Ulysses.
When Eugene O’Neill writes a play that he entitles Mourning Becomes Electra, he is telling us through that title what he doesn’t tell us overtly in the play itself, that it is in some way a reworking of the myth of the House of Atreus. And obviously in both cases, those authors simply assume that their audiences are familiar enough with classical mythology that they will understand the point of the reference in the title.
Other modern authors don’t indicate their intentions so clearly, but that doesn’t make their debt to classical mythology necessarily any less. An example of what I mean here would be Charles Fraser’s marvelous novel, Cold Mountain, that came out a couple of years ago which owes not just much of its plot, but many of its specific episodes and much of its imagery to the Odyssey. It is a story about a Civil War soldier walking home to rejoin his fiancee, and it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that it is a reworking of or a retelling of the Odyssey set in the post-Civil War American South, though with some remarkable changes from the Odyssey as well.
Now, classical mythology clearly permeates our culture’s literature. It also permeates our culture’s art. Not so much, I suppose, in modern art as in art from the Middle Ages up through the last century or so, but anyone who has ever gone to a great art museum will remember that when you look at paintings in any of the great art museums in Europe or America, a great many of them have their subject matter taken either directly from the Bible or directly from classical mythology.