A new wave of twenty-first century studies of Ovid, beginning with Lynn Enterline's The Rhetoric of the Body From Ovid to Shakespeare and Goran Stanivukovic's edited collection Ovid and the Renaissance Body, has foregone traditional kinds of critical attention to mythological allusions and references in the generations following him. Focused instead on how Ovid represents bodily and textual relations, contemporary Ovidian criticism has crossed studies of genre with studies of how subsequent authors understood him to treat sexuality's links to subjectivity, and how Ovidian bodies may be connected to Ovidian texts and narrative forms.

In Shakespeare's Ovid and the Spectre of the Medieval, however, Lindsay Ann Reid sets out to deepen current readers' sense of Shakespeare's Ovidianism by adding an historical dimension to his reading. She points out how often Shakespeare's understanding of Ovid is mediated through medieval authors' treatments—especially those of Chaucer and Gower—as well as through his own Latin and his reliance on contemporary translations. She thus continues the kind of work she began in her 2014 Ovidian Bibliofictions and the Tudor Book, where she concentrated on the afterlives of the Heroides as they manifested not only in direct literary reference to particular heroines' letters but also in later texts' imitations of Ovid's convictions about the ephemerality of writing and new stories' dependence on past versions of their subject matter. Here, concentrating specifically on Shakespeare, Reid wants to explore how such textual webs spinning outward from Ovid into the Confessio Amantis, Troilus and Criseyde, and The Legend of Good Women show up in his early works. She is not so much interested in Ovidian stories' recurrence in Shakespeare as she is in what she calls the "haunting" of a Renaissance Ovid by its medieval forebears (p. 37). For her, the spectral presence of literary ancestors—medieval as well as classical—must include styles of writing and interpretation modelled by medieval authors as well as early modern authors' more direct access to the classics.

This is all well and good: Ovid's history of being read and responded to in the west is long and rich. Reid clearly understands that at their best, Renaissance authors engaged in complex reproduction rather than mere copying, and that this reproduction aimed at feeling and import as much as it did at mere narrative detail. Recognizing the medieval elements of Shakespeare's classical memories [End Page 418] and reworkings fills in some gaps in our histories of Renaissance poetic imitation, undercutting the notion that such histories can sometimes generate, namely that Shakespeare's classicism springs directly from the ancient world with no intervening stops. And yet I wonder if Reid's choice to focus on Elizabethan Shakespeare—the book includes chapters on The Taming of the Shrew, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Rape of Lucrece, and the Narcissus myth in Twelfth Night—does not undercut her central argument about the rich complexity medieval readings add to Shakespeare's classical inheritance. Her choice of works that do not literally invoke stories from Chaucer or Gower is a smart one if she intends to make a larger argument about the medieval readings that subtly pervade Shakespeare's Ovidianism. But she also quotes Renaissance poetry scholar Colin Burrow's remark that "after around 1600 … Shakespeare's references to Ovidian stories very often function as narrative hints" only (p. 6). Ovid was, of course, vitally interested in how narrative style could inflect his poetic subjects. We know that Paris' elopement with Helen helped initiate the Trojan War, but in Heroides 5, Oenone—the girl he left behind—narrates Paris' desertion in the style of what would become complaint, reproducing epic material as a matter of anguished personal affect. Since she is committed to uncovering the pervasive, "spectral" quality of Shakespeare's Ovidianism, which certainly includes the kind of striking tonal and formal dissonances we see in Heroides 5 that Renaissance...