Tag Archives: Ovid

Living statues and literary pageants: Shakespeare’s Birthday 2018

This weekend Shakespeare’s 454th birthday will be celebrated in the town of his birth, as it has been for nearly two centuries. While there are elements of the Birthday that have become traditional, almost every year the organisers add new … Continue reading

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Ovid and Shakespeare: the world’s greatest storytellers

Anyone who’s interested in Shakespeare will have heard the name Ovid, but how much do we really know about him? I’ve written a couple of posts on Ovid myself, but I have never really investigated the story of this great … Continue reading

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Influences on Shakespeare

The source books from which Shakespeare took the main stories of his plays are well-known, sometimes so important that he quoted almost word for word, as in Enobarbus’s description of Cleopatra from Plutarch’s Lives. Other sources seem to have been … Continue reading

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Celebrating Ovid 2000 years on

2017 marks the 2000th anniversary of the death of the Roman writer Ovid, whose  Metamorphoses has continued to be one of the most influential of literary works. As Shakespeare’s favourite writer, the RSC, and its current Artistic Director Gregory Doran … Continue reading

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The Rape of Lucrece

Exactly 420 years ago, on 9 May 1594, Shakespeare’s long poem The Rape of Lucrece was registered before being published later that year. In the dedication to the poem he had written the year before, Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare sounds … Continue reading

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Shakespeare and Ovid’s Metamorphoses

In 1598 the writer Francis Meres wrote that “the witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare”. And well he might: Shakespeare had already written his own version of one of Ovid’s tales, as well as borrowing stories … Continue reading

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Shakespeare’s school: new discoveries

This is the second post I’m writing about the new book, J R Mulryne’s The Guild and Guild Buildings of Shakespeare’s Stratford: Society, Religion, School and Stage, published by Ashgate. The first can be found here. The fame of this … Continue reading

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