Ovidian Narrative and Shakespeare’s Subversion of the Genre

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Ovidian Narrative is one of the most popular literary genres marking the Elizabethan England and has a significant influence on Elizabethan writers such as Thomas Lodge, Christopher Marlowe, and William Shakespeare. When one examines Ovidian narrative as a popular genre in the sixteenth-century England, there are two directions. First, the writers such as Thomas Lodge and Christopher Marlowe follow the formal features of Ovidian narrative, in particular, the three ones outlined by William Keach: “the self-conscious presentation of an already familiar myth,” “sexual ambivalence,” and “stylistic virtuosity.” However, Shakespeare subverts and rewrites the genre in his poem Venus and Adonis. Indeed, Shakespeare subverts the genre beyond formal bounds set out by Ovidian narrative.
In order to discuss the ways in which Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis subverts the genre of Ovidian narrative, this paper examines and compares the work of Ovid himself, Metamorphoses, and the works of the key writers of Elizabethan Ovidian narratives, Lodge’s Scillaes Metamorphosis and Marlowe’s Hero and Leander. Venus and Adonis shares the same qualities with Ovid as the works of Lodge and Marlowe, but in the sense of class, gender, sexuality, and rhetoric, the poem subverts the boundaries of the genre as Ovid, Lodge, and Marlowe define them. The generic study of these poems, indeed, makes it easier to understand Elizabethan England as “social codes.”

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