Play Within the Play Concept Ovid and Shakespeare

Shakespeare himself has shown that he was proud to be Ovids successful ape.-R. K. Root   Demetrius, with Helena in hot pursuit, pedals through a forest where an under-skilled amateur repertory group rehearses and a handful of fairies lives. Sound almost familiar? Its the nineteenth century setting of the 1999 movie release (starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Calista Flockhart) of Midsummer Nights Dream, one of William Shakespeares comedies that owe a great debt to the Romans. While Shakespeare may have been the worlds greatest writer, originality in crafting a storyline wasnt his forte. Instead of inventing stories, he embellished ones he borrowed -- principally from other renowned storytellers, like Vergil  and Ovid, who retold familiar myths in their major works, Aeneid and Metamorphoses. The classical equivalent of the Bible, though without canonical authority.​McCarty, Implicit Patterns in Ovids Metamorphoses Neatly interweaving 15 books of stories -- telling the entire mythological history of mankind since the creation -- may have been Ovids greatest achievement in Metamorphoses. Taking the story-in-a-story element from Ovids version, Shakespeare recast the tale of Pyramus and Thisbe seamlessly into his own medium, as a play within a play for wedding entertainment. Both versions have an audience: In Ovids, Alcithoe and her sisters choose not to honor Bacchus but instead stay at home doing their chores and listening to stories. Given a choice, they first opt to hear the tale of the metamorphosis of the mulberry (aka Pyramus and Thisbe).In  Midsummer Nights Dream, where the love flower that changes color through Cupids ministry is love-in-idleness (a pansy), the play is also chosen from a list of mythological alternates and then performed very badly for the highly critical audience of Hippolyta and Theseus. Theseus, like Alcithoe, rejects the ways of Bacchus. Love is unimportant to Theseus. Hermias father wants his daughter to marry Lysander, although everyone knows she and Lysander are in love. Theseus asserts that its the fathers right to choose his daughters husband. If she chooses to disobey, Theseus warns, the consequences will be just as loveless. Hermia...But I beseech your grace that I may knowThe worst that may befall me in this case,If I refuse to wed Demetrius.TheseusEither to die the death or to abjureFor ever the society of men.-Act I Scene i, Midsummer Nights Dream To escape impossible terms, Hermia flees with Lysander into the forest. Its been suggested that even the fairies, albeit borrowed from English and French traditions, may also owe a debt to Ovid. Jeremy McNamara  says the fairies are modernized gods: Like Ovids gods, Shakespeares fairies are menacing and powerful, with a control over nature and men, even if they are ultimately more benign. Metamorphosis (transformation), central to Ovids opus, is clearly represented in Midsummer Nights Dream by Bottoms partial transformation to a fà ªted donkey (a reference to another Metamorphoses, that of the 2nd century A.D. novelist Apuleius). More subtle metamorphoses can be seen in the many love relationships among fairies and mortals. But there are even closer similarities in the plots, close enough to make it hard to determine whether Shakespeare went straight to Ovid or to his translator, Golding. Titania represents classical mythology in A Midsummer Nights Dream. Like Oberon she is a nature deity. She tells Bottom this in Act III, scene 1, when she informs him that I am a sprit of no common rate. / The summer still doth tend upon my state, Her power over nature is also reflected in the disruptions in weather patterns in Act II scene 1, caused by her argument with Oberon. The derivation of her name is uncertain. Ovid used it in Metamorphoses (iii, 173) as a epithet of Diana and later of Latona and Circe. However, this did not appear in the translation available to Shakespeare.* Either he read it in the original, or his use of the name is a coincidence. Another possible derivation is from the Titans of Greek mythology. Source Monmouth College, History department