ABSTRACT
The Ancient Roman poet of change, Ovid, provided an impetus for artistic creation in the early modern period, leading to his widespread influence throughout the world and his long, rich, global afterlife. European Renaissance visual artists and writers appropriated the subject matter of his poetry and the method that he used – metamorphosis or creative transformation – as a basis for their own artistic works. Ovid provided alternative structures, methods, and perspectives – all of which enabled the English stage to experiment with strategies of adaptation, variances of dramatic form, and concepts of theatrical arts. Dramatists like Marlowe and Shakespeare foregrounded Ovidian perspectives on the stage in the 1590s, thereby transporting the global poet to their local theatrical space. This decade – arguably the “Ovidian” decade of the Elizabethan theater – was led by Christopher Marlowe, the quintessential Ovidian poet-playwright whose path Shakespeare continued and expanded until The Tempest (1600–1601) and Ben Jonson’s satirical Poetaster (1600) marked the end of the era. Nevertheless, even after the Ovid craze faded, a spectral Ovid continued to haunt the English stage in numerous appropriations and adaptations well into the eighteenth century.
