Petrarch's and Shakespeare's Sonnets - Ovidian Influences in The Sonnets

Ovidian Influences in The Sonnets

Ovid's completion of the Metamorphoses ensured that, as he puts it, part of him will survive the death of his own body. The phrasing at the end of the Metamorphoses, in the account of Hercules’ transfiguration upon Oeta and the likening of poetic achievement to spiritual transcendence captures some of the most extravagant claims that western culture has made for such achievement.

Ovid was a uniquely important influence of Petrarch. Among the Ovidian texts to which Petrarch was attracted was one of those that Shakespeare fancied, and he gives it almost exactly Shakespeare’s spin.

Laura, left behind in France, is his better part; even at a great distance she commands his heart and voice. Indeed, in making it impossible for him to be silent, she is his Muse; Petrarch turns out to be the historical link between the newer meaning of Ovid’s theory of his “better half” and its original one. In the speech that Petrarch gives when he receives the laurel crown on the Capitoline Hill he invokes the conclusion to the Metamorphoses straightforwardly as a proof for his thesis about the nobility of poetic fame, and taken together the two citations define one of the most innovative and influential twists that he gives to the tradition of fin’ amors: this poet’s love for his lady is, by design, all but indistinguishable from his literary ambition, his love of the laurel crown. The symbolic focus of that coincidence is the story of Daphne’s transformation into Apollo’s tree. Petrarch made the story in the Metamorphoses the dominant myth of the longest poem in the sequence, Canzoniere 23. This poem is a virtuoso sequence of a half dozen Ovidian myths, from Apollo and Daphne to Actaeon and Diana, offered up as figuration of the poet’s own subjective experience; it has become known as the canzone della metamorfosi, a sustained “lyricization of epic materials,” which effectively rewrites Ovid’s long poem as erotic and professional autobiography.

This incorporation of the Metamorphoses into lyricism has momentous consequences for the following history of Petrarchanism, whereas poets such as Pierre de Ronsard and Barnabe Barnes, used each of the Ovidian myths as a figure for achieved sexual intercourse. Within the lyric sequence, such evocations play against the expectation of female unattainability, which is also one of Petrarch’s legacies, and contribute powerfully to Petrarchanism’s reputation for shameless and often bizarre sensuality.

We find this phrase’s English equivalent twice in Shakespeare’s Sonnets. In neither case, however, is the context the same as that of Ovid’s. Shakespeare makes such boasts in the Sonnets, and they owe much to Ovidian precedent; but this particular phrase has migrated into different territory, the lover’s affirmation of a transcendent dependence on the beloved. Ovid never writes this way of Corinna in his Amores, where she is only an occasional longing; it is unmistakably his desire, not her merit that animates the Amores. Shakespeare, however, regards the beloved object highly as the all-inclusive focus. Indeed, justification of the lover’s existence marks the decisive new start for European love poetry in the thirteenth century.

Despite Shakespeare’s interest in and references of Ovid in his Sonnets, the second decade of the seventeenth century brought about a departure from the Ovidian territory that Renaissance sonneteering had cultivated. Shakespeare tended to ban mythology from his Sonnets. Of the few mythological allusions Shakespeare incorporates into the sonnets, seldom are they depicted in the same way Ovid depicts them in his Metamorphoses. In Sonnet 53, Adonis is paired with Helen as an exemplar of human beauty (53.5, 7); Mars’ name appears, though not Venus (55.7); ‘heavie Saturne’ laughs and dances with ‘proud pide Aprill’ (98.2-4); the nightingale is called Philomel (102.7) and the phoenix is mentioned (19.4). In the procreation sonnets, a reference to the myth of Narcissus is clearly intended by Shakespeare.

Moreover, the latter half of the Sonnets depicts less flesh in the form of seduction. In the dark lady poems, the seduction has already succeeded; its consequences are overwhelmingly shame and anger. Desire in the young man is of a different order, intense but also idealized and Platonic in a way which male Petrarchists writing about women often attempt but seldom achieve. Shakespeare calls his young man "sweet boy" (108, 5) and alludes occasionally to "rosie lips and cheeks" (116, 9), but is otherwise restrained and abstract.