In Spenser and Ovid, Syrithe Pugh gives the first sustained account of Ovid's presence in the Spenser canon, uncovering new evidence to reveal the thematic and formal debts many of Spenser's poems owe to Ovid, particularly when considered in the light of an informed understanding of all of Ovid's work. Pugh's reading presents a challenge to New Historicist assumptions, as she contests both the traditional insistence on Virgil as Spenser's prime classical model and the idea it has perpetuated of Spenser as Elizabeth I's imperial propagandist. In fact, Pugh locates Ovid's importance to Spenser precisely in his counter-Virgilian world view, with its high valuation of faithful love, concern for individual freedom, distrust of imperial rule, and the poet's claim to vatic authority in opposition to political power. Her study spans Spenser's career from the inaugural Shepheardes Calender to what was probably his last poem, The Mutabilitie Cantos, and embraces his work in the genres of pastoral, love poetry, and epic romance.

It has long been recognized that Spenser's poetry often alludes to and imitates the work of Ovid. This book represents an attempt to read as systematic this allusion and imitation of Ovid across Spencer's career which has previously been kept fragmentaryand contained.

The author's predecessors focus almost exclusively on the Metamorphoses as intertext, but do not often distinguish between early modern Latin editions of the poem and translations such as Arthur Golding's. Although Spenser read Ovid in his native language, during the quarter-century of his writing career, his countrymen such as Shakespeare, Donne, and Lodge imitate and recast the ancient author. During this English aetas Ovidiana, a translation industry arises simultaneously so that the entire corpus is rendered into English, from Golding's Metamorphoses (1567) to Wye Saltonstall's Ex Ponto (1638). Since the sixteenth century did not often read or hear a Roman poet in prose renditions, the author uses Renaissance poetical verse translations (with the Latin text) to explore Spenser's variegated use of Ovid: how he sounded as early modern English poetry.

These cantos, published posthumously, are general agreed to contain some of the finest poetry in "The Faerie Queene", and are of central importance in the study of philosophic and religious beliefs in the late sixteenth century.

Dubbed 'the English Virgil' in his own lifetime, Spenser has been compared to the Augustan laureate ever since. He invited the comparison, expecting a readership intimately familiar with Virgil's works to notice and interpret his rich web of allusion and imitation, but also his significant departures and transformations.This volume considers Spenser's pastoral poetry, the genre which announces the inception of a Virgilian career in The Shepheardes Calender, and to which he returns in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, throwing the 'Virgilian career' into reverse. His sustained dialogue with Virgil's Eclogues bewrays at once a profound debt to Virgil and a deep-seated unease with his values and priorities, not least his subordination of pastoral to epic.Drawing on the commentary tradition and engaging with current critical debates, this study of Spenser's interpretation, imitation and revision of Virgil casts new light on both poets-and on the genre of pastoral itself.

The range of poetic invention that occurred in Renaissance English literature was vast, from the lyric eroticism of the late sixteenth century to the rise of libertinism in the late seventeenth century. Heather James argues that Ovid, as the poet-philosopher of literary innovation and free speech, was the galvanizing force behind this extraordinary level of poetic creativity. Moving beyond mere topicality, she identifies the ingenuity, novelty and audacity of the period's poetry as the political inverse of censorship culture. Considering Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, Milton and Wharton among many others, the book explains how free speech was extended into the growing domain of English letters, and thereby presents a new model of the relationship between early modern poetry and political philosophy.

This volume explores early modern recreations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, focusing on the creative ingenium of artists and writers who freely handled the original text so as to adapt it to different artistic media and genres.