Jacobson, Miriam
TR 2 :20 PM
Park Hall 0145
Renaissance Ovid
In sixteenth and seventeenth-century Britain, the most widely read and studied classical author was the wildly entertaining Roman poet Ovid. This is the writer boys were taught to read in Latin in grammar school--and girls with private tutors. Ovid wrote witty and macabre stories and poems, and was exiled to Tomus on the Black Sea by the emperor Augustus for a mysterious crime that remains unexplained today. The centerpiece of Renaissance reading was Ovid's outrageously thrilling, violent, humorous and bizarre poem The Metamorphoses, a series of ancient Greek and Roman myths of bodily transformation. This text and the other poetic works of Ovid deeply influenced some of the most famous writers and culture creators from the early modern period, not only in poetic adaptations of these stories, but in drama and art as well. From the gory dark-humored tragedy of Shakepeare's Titus Andronicus (based on Ovid's Metamorphoses's tale of Procne Philomel) to John Donne's lesbian elegy “Sappho to Philaenis” (based on a poetic love letter from Ovid's Heroides); from Shakespeare's serious poem about rape, knowledge, and regime change The Rape of Lucrece (based on a myth from Ovid's seasonal Roman ritual calender the Fasti) to John Lyly's gender-bending and Queer-friendly forest romp Galatea (the tale of Iphis and Ianthe from Ovid's Metamorphoses), we will simultaneously examine Ovid's role in dominating and shaping early modern culture, and how early modern writers critiqued and responded to it.
The course is organized around a series of Ovid's writing and the corresponding Renaissance texts, paintings, and objects that were inspired by them. We'll begin by learning about Ovid's biography and his writings. Then we'll have a unit on the Metamorphoses in drama and poetry, a unit on The Fasti (a poetic calendar of festivals) in poetry and art, one on the Heroides (poetic mythological love letters) in poetry, a unit on the Amores (witty lyric love poems), and even a unit on Renaissance drama inspired by Ovid's tumultuous life.