Graduation Year
2024
Document Type
Open Access Senior Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
English
Reader 1
Tessie Prakas
Reader 2
Michelle Decker
Terms of Use & License Information
Rights Information
© 2024 Haley Kerner
Abstract
In an essay called ‘Shakespeare’s Ovid’, scholar Johnathan Bate wrote that “the first encounter between the English dramatist and the Roman poet probably occurred in the classroom of the grammar school at Stratford-upon-Avon” (Ovid, Golding, Bate, xli). Of course, the two would continue to meet many times in the concluding years. Shakespeare would have long conversations with Ovid’s Metamorphoses, especially through the voice of his characters as they jumped back and forth from his mind to the page. Shakespeare would invoke Ovid in most of his plays and many of his sonnets, guiding his readers and audience through the Roman bard’s fantastical journeys. Much of Ovid’s poetry is found in plays like Titus Andronicus, a violent retelling of Ovid’s “Tereus, Procne, and Philomela”, or in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where not only is the tale of “Pyramus and Thisbe” played out within the play, but others like Ovid’s “Apollo and Daphne” or “Venus and Adonis” are seen through the characters chasing through the woods. Perhaps less obvious are the comparisons of Ovid’s “The Prophecies of Ocyrhoë” and “The Judgement of Tiresias” to Shakespeare’s fated Cassandra from the play Troilus and Cressida. This thesis will focus on Shakespeare’s use of Ovid’s poems to discuss and critique issues of gender and womanhood in early modern England while under the confines of censorship. The plays used, represent a variety of genre, and the selected Ovidian poems either directly tie into the story lines of the plays or don’t but ultimately boost the argument that there are issues with how women are seen (or not) and treated. I will explore the idea of performance, the dramatic, but also in the context of what it means to be a woman existing in a world run by men. I will also focus on the notion of prophecy and foreshadowing and how they not only exist in the stories themselves but play into the audience’s understanding of how the plays are supposed to come across.
Recommended Citation
Kerner, Haley, "To Be a Woman is to Perform: How Gender and Womanhood are Discussed Through Shakespeare’s Use of Mythology" (2024). Scripps Senior Theses. 2442.
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/2442
