Ovid, Shakespeare, and 'The Latinist' (Part Two)

Held on the first Thursday of the month, the Folger’s virtual book club is free and open to all. To spark discussion, speakers provide historical context, throw in trivia, and speak to relevant items from the library collection in a brief presentation to participants before small-group discussion begins.

Here, we revisit conversation between emma poltrack and Dr. Will Tosh as part of our discussion of The Latinist, the second of a two-part series. Discussion questions for the novel can be found here.

Catch-up with the first part of our conversation here

We would like to thank the Capitol Hill Community Foundation and the Junior League of Washington for their generous support of this program.

emma poltrack (Community and Audience Engagement Program Manager, Folger Shakespeare Library): I feel like there’s so much in this book that has to do with like morality and boundaries and what constitutes “good” is not always clear. Chris makes a lot of obviously very bad choices, but Tessa makes a lot of choices that are maybe not dealing with the same scale but are questionable.

Dr. Will Tosh (Head of Research, Shakespeare’s Globe): It’s fascinating isn’t it? The extent to which Prins wants us to see his protagonists as easily mapping on to Apollo and Daphne. The whole premise of the book sets up a fairly obvious parallel that we’re invited to see, and we’re invited to see early on. We’re told that Chris looks at himself in the mirror and says, “Not exactly Apollonian, but…” And there’s the moment where Tessa is in her apartment and the laurel tree is tapping against her window, and you go, okay, right, we’re seeing those overlaps, but it’s not wholly straightforward, and who is pursuing whom, and what Tessa is pursuing. She’s not quite pursuing Chris, but she’s certainly pursuing her intellectual pursuit of Marius and it becomes more ambiguous.

ep: You talked about pursuit, which brings me to this illustration from Midsummer Night’s Dream of Helena pursuing Demetrius. I think, without context, if you talk about someone being chased, my sympathy is going to be with the person being chased. But here my sympathy is quite often with Helena. She should get the hint a bit more, but I feel sorry for her. I wondered if you could speak more about that idea of chase.

034914-Medium_6000px — Midsummer night's dream, Helena pursues Demetrius. Louis Rhead. 1917/1918. Folger Shakespeare Library: ART Box R469 no.79.

WT: There’s a lot of it in Metamorphoses. And I would say that the majority is the heterosexualized chase that we see in Apollo and Daphne. But not all of it. And interestingly, there are a couple of standout stories where the pursued figure is a young man. Possibly the most famous from a Shakespearean perspective is Venus and Adonis, who obviously Shakespeare rewrites as his first major narrative poem, where the reluctant figure is Adonis the huntsman and Venus is a very powerful female wooer who really tries very hard to overpower him.

Perhaps a weirder one in some ways, and a more interesting one from the perspective of sort of ideas around sexuality and gender, is Hermaphroditus and Salmacis. Hermaphroditus, is again a kind of Ovidian male pinup, a real beauty, the son of Hermes and Aphrodite, happens to be taking a journey and pauses at a pool, at a refreshing pool where he wants to have a swim. And as he takes off his clothes and slips into the water, the water nymph who’s called Salmacis gets completely overwhelmed with lust and charges into the pool after him and overpowers him.

And a little bit like Daphne’s call to be transformed into something to save her, Hermaphroditus also calls out to a parent, Aphrodite slash Venus, goddess of love, to say, do something, do something. And what Venus chooses to do is fuse Hermaphroditus and Salmacis into a single intersex being. So that’s her choice to solve the situation, to make this drastic move that morphs Hermaphroditus into a twin -souled being, with the proviso that everyone who steps into the waters will also step out both genders, intersex. It’s a really fascinating story.

You get both in Ovid, and I think Shakespeare is absolutely drawing on that. What’s interesting about Midsummer Night’s Dream, I think, is that although it has as a meta -theatrical story, a story taken from Ovid, which is Pyramus and Thysbe, the story of the play of the Midsummer Night’s Dream is not directly taken from Ovid but it is very flavored by it. There’s the sort of Grecian classical setting, but also I think in the way the play explores ideas of pursuit, as we see in this illustration, but also of course transformation, the big one being Bottom’s transformation or partial transformation into an ass, and Titania’s compelled seduction of him. Again, a very Ovidian notion that a powerful God is compelling, a kind of an erotic union, without the free consent of the people involved.

034541-Small_1500px (1) — Midsummer night's dream, act III, sc. 1, Bottom, Titania and the fairies. Phil Ebbutt. Late 19th or early 20th century. Folger Shakespeare Library: ART Box E15 no.1.

Metamorphoses is such an important influence on Shakespeare from really his very earliest years, and I think Midsummer Night’s Dream is a sort of imaginative refraction of a lot of what he’s reading and learning from in his in his younger years into a sort of ruralized, English-ized version of Ovid’s metamorphic world.

ep: Something that’s been striking me as you talk is that these situations in which people are transformed is often because they are asking the gods for help, but they don’t specify. By asking for help, you’re making yourself so vulnerable to the power that’s above you to then choose how you’re going to be helped, which of course is a big part of The Latinist in a way, because it’s all kicked off by Tessa having to ask Chris for that recommendation letter that then is totally without her influence or knowledge or input.

WT: Yes that’s it that’s interesting isn’t it? I was thinking as the story progresses and Tessa goes off to Isola Sacra on that exciting dig. There’s that nice to throw away moment where they’re looking at curse tablets that they’ve excavated, those sort of clay tablets that you inscribe some sort of curse against someone you hate and throw it into the well. And she talks about performative language and how a curse tablet is like a sort of performative act where the uttering of it kind of produces the effect and she thinks “like a recommendation letter,” this sort of idea that there’s such efficacy and such power in something that someone can say or write. Prins is exploring some of the power dynamics in academia. It’s a campus novel and it’s a novel that’s really interested in inequities of power and in appropriateness of relationships and ways in which cloisters and ivory towers can produce very unsatisfactory emotional outcomes when emotional investment is placed in the wrong direction.

ep: We have covered so much this evening! Thank you so much for sharing your time with us and reflecting on Ovid and The Latinist.

WT: A pleasure.