The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare

This persuasive book analyses the complex, often violent connections between body and voice in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and narrative, lyric and dramatic works by Petrarch, Marston and Shakespeare. Lynn Enterline describes the foundational yet often disruptive force that Ovidian rhetoric exerts on early modern poetry, particularly on representations of the self, the body and erotic life. Paying close attention to the trope of the female voice in the Metamorphoses, as well as early modern attempts at transgendered ventriloquism that are indebted to Ovid’s work, she argues that Ovid’s rhetoric of the body profoundly challenges Renaissance representations of authorship as well as conceptions about the difference between male and female experience. This vividly original book makes a vital contribution to the study of Ovid’s presence in Renaissance literature.

• Brilliant comparative study of Latin, Italian and English poetry and drama • Reads in an altternative way a long tradition of representing and understanding the body and gender • Makes an argument about the impact of Ovid on Renaissance notions of authorship and subjectivity

Acknowledgements; 1. Pursuing Daphne; 2. Medusa’s mouth: body and voice in the Metamorphoses; 3. Embodied voices: autobiography and fetishism in the Rime Sparse; 4. ‘Be not obsceane though wanton’: Marston’s Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image; 5. ‘Poor instruments’ and unspeakable events in The Rape of Lucrece; 6. ‘You speak a language that I understand not’: the rhetoric of animation in The Winter’s Tale; Notes; Index.

‘Lynn Enterline’s The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare is a subtle, sophisticated, and lucid essay on the Ovidian tradition. Particularly impressive is the clarity and magisterial logic with which she sets complex issues in relation to each other, through extraordinarily nuanced readings. No one has done a better job of mapping the intersection of Ovidianism and Petrarchanism and their bearing on Elizabethan literature.’ Leonard Barkan, New York University