Louise Hollandine (1622–1709), granddaughter to Britain's King James I (1566–1625) and “scion of the most staunchly Protestant branch of the Stuart dynasty” was born in The Hague. It was in this city that her parents, Frederick V, Elector Palatine and short-lived King of Bohemia (1596–1632) and Elizabeth Stuart (1596–1662), dwelt in exile following their flight from Prague in 1620. When Louise Hollandine is now remembered at all, it is usually for her intrepid social and religious transformation in the late 1650s from Protestant princess to runaway Catholic nun and eventual Abbess of Maubuisson in Paris. Yet she was also an artist, as we are reminded by a youthful self-portrait in which the princess meaningfully presents herself with a mahlstick in hand (Figure 5.1). Having received her childhood education primarily at her family's Prinsenhof, or nursery palace, in Leiden, Louise Hollandine is reputed to have begun drawing lessons at the age of six. Later, along with a number of her many siblings, she advanced her studies under the tutelage of Gerard van Honthorst (1590–1656). As the Memoirs of her younger sister Sophia of Hanover (1630–1714) detail, Louise Hollandine “completely devoted herself to painting” in her youth, and “so great was her talent that she could capture peoples’ likeness without them having to sit for her.” What is more, as a second self-portrait indicates, she continued these artistic pursuits even after taking the veil (Figure 5.2).

Over the past three decades, a steady flow of scholarship has investigated the postclassical reception of Publius Ovidius Naso, the ancient Roman poet better known in Anglophone contexts as Ovid – a trend evinced, for example, by the 2014 appearance of the hefty Handbook to the Reception of Ovid edited by John F. Miller and Carole E. Newlands. The field continues only to expand, with the critical mass of relevant publications concentrating on the early modern period. The ever-growing body of work on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ovidiana demonstrates that this classical poet's hold on the early modern imagination was both ubiquitous and complex. Often associated with the lewd and/or subversive, Ovid was also indisputably a canonical figure whose writings were enshrined in the pan-European humanist educational curriculum. In short, he was early modernity's go-to source for Greco-Roman mythological narratives and the age's most lauded rhetorical model. ‘Ovidius Naso was the man’, as Shakespeare's Holofernes famously affirms in Love's Labour's Lost, ‘for the elegancy, facility, and golden cadence of poesy’. The late Elizabethan milieu, in particular, is widely recognised as a context in which the ‘Ovidian’ mode permeated literary discourse, conspicuously serving, as scholars such as Cora Fox and Daniel D. Moss have argued, as ‘a code for emotional expression’ and an ‘allusive language through which’ authors ‘competed with one another …, addressing readers, patrons, and audiences’ who were themselves ‘increasingly familiar with Ovidian materials and styles’.

Contemporary scholarship is largely in agreement with Robert Kilburn Root's century-old assessment that ‘the whole character of Shakespeare's mythology is essentially Ovidian’. Furthermore, it is peppered with assertions that ‘Shakespeare [was] profoundly inspired by [his] generation's revival of what they saw as a more “authentic” Ovid’ than that invoked by their vernacular precursors or that he ‘lived during a period in which ways of reading Ovid underwent radical transformation’. But what exactly do we mean when we identify particular instances of literary ‘Ovidianism’ in an early modern English context? What counts as ‘Ovidian’?

Directed by Peter Gill, the Royal Shakespeare Company's Twelfth Night of 1974 deserves much credit for popularising our widespread contemporary sense that the seaside dukedom of Illyria is ‘a land where human beings are all mirrors to each other, casting back reflections – whether identical, reversed, or absurdly distorted – that most fail to recognize as images of themselves’. William Dudley's minimalistic set design for this production strikingly featured ‘a stage with slatted walls, constructed in isolable blocks’, with ‘the central block of the back wall, which slid forward to create two upstage entrances’ portraying a larger-than-life ‘pale portrait of Narcissus’. Looming behind and between the onstage Shakespearean characters, this symbolically suggestive scenery seems to have inspired divisive audience reactions. Though it was despairingly described by Shakespeare Quarterly's unenthusiastic reviewer Robert Speaight as ‘the only pictorial element in the bleakest decor that can ever have been devised for this highly decorative play’, Irving Wardle's review in London's Times instead argued that this Narcissus portrait visually elucidated ‘the main intention of … Gill's production’: that is, to present Twelfth Night as a play whose characters ‘are intoxicated with their own reflections’ and must navigate ‘through an Ovidian obstacle course’ before ‘they learn to turn away from the mirror’.

In the wake of Gill's mythologically energised Twelfth Night, a body of scholarship began to emerge in the late 1970s exploring the specific relations between Ovid's tale of Narcissus in Metamorphoses 3 and this Shakespearean comedy. The first of these seems to have been A.B. Taylor's 1977 ‘Shakespeare and Golding: Viola's Interview with Olivia and Echo and Narcissus’, which was followed by D.J. Palmer's 1979 ‘Twelfth Night and the Myth of Echo and Narcissus’. Taylor would return to this issue repeatedly over the next decades, and the connections between Narcissus and Twelfth Night have been elsewhere treated in Jonathan Bate's Shakespeare and Ovid, William C. Carroll's The Metamorphoses of Shakespearean Comedy, and Rene Girard's A Theatre of Envy, amongst other works.

This is a work about spectres. Succinctly put, it is concerned with the mutual hauntings of Ovid, Chaucer, and Gower in the early modern English literary imagination. As such, it seems only appropriate to begin with an instructive seventeenth-century ghost story. In 1672, an anonymously written book attributed to ‘a Lover of Antiquity’ was printed in London (figure 1). Sold by Richard Mills, this 133-page octavo bears the curious title:

This lengthy and somewhat convoluted description of the volume's contents is followed on the title page by a Horatian line (‘Multa renascentur quae iam cecidere, &c.’, a motto ‘englished’ nearly a century earlier by George Puttenham as ‘Many a word yfalne shall eft arise’) that is seemingly calculated to signal the volume's interest in the characteristic humanist enterprise of revivifying ‘ancient’ texts. Continuing in this vein, a range of peritextual materials throughout Chaucer's Ghoast repeatedly juxtapose old and new, evincing a sustained interest in the dynamics of literary resurrection. ‘To the Readers’, for instance, begins with the proclamation that ‘New Books & Pamphlets, Sirs, [are] now adays thrust so fast out of the Press, that they will not give the Readers time to breath’, yet the anonymous author immediately qualifies this with the further assertion that it has always been so. This, too, he contends, ‘was the misery of Juvenals time’. From this initial gesture towards novelty's inevitable repetitions, ‘To the Readers’ proceeds to introduce a related paradox: the volume's literary contents themselves are also simultaneously ‘neither new nor old’.

Roughly halfway through Lucrece, Shakespeare's sophomore epyllion of 1594 and one of the few narrative poems he would ever compose, the narrator provides what Jonathan Bate has called ‘temporal punctuation’ for the titular heroine's complaint: he does so with an allusion to the womancum- nightingale Philomela, whose violent tragedy of kidnapping, sexual assault, and mutilation is relayed in Book 6 of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Noting the approach of ‘blushing morrow’ as ‘solemn night … descend[s] / To ugly hell’, Shakespeare's narrator declares Lucrece a ‘lamenting Philomel’ in a reference that, it has been observed, ‘seems designed to create syntactical parallels between the two violated women’. A mere seven stanzas later, the Shakespearean heroine reaffirms this affinity, for she proceeds to address Philomela directly:

In these lines, Shakespeare's ‘cloudy Lucrece’ not only aligns her own rape with that of this legendary victim, but she also attributes the nightingale's characteristic aversion to the dawn – like her own antipathy towards ‘Revealing day’ – to the bird's parallel desire to avoid the shame of diurnal Visibility.

As much as Chaucer was associated in the early modern imagination with Ovid, so too was Shakespeare. In Palladis Tamia of 1598, the earliest piece of literary criticism to definitively discuss the nascent oeuvre of what is now early modern England's best-known author, Francis Meres used the vocabulary of metempsychotic literary spectrality when he claimed ‘as the soule of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras: so the sweete wittie soule of Ovid lives in mellifluous and hony-tongued Shakespeare’. Though Meres's often-quoted contention that Ovid's spirit can be recognised in Shakespeare's ‘sugred’ works should be taken cum grano salis (after all, Shakespeare was hardly the only English author he compared to this same Roman precursor), even so, his sense of Shakespeare as a tangibly Ovidian writer is one that continues to be felt to this day.

Antiquity's ‘most capricious poet’, as he is called by As You Like It's Touchstone, Ovid has been regularly hailed by twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury critics as having been Shakespeare's favourite author. To provide just a cursory smattering of the many such examples that could be cited: Russ McDonald sees ‘the allusive verbal texture of [Shakespeare's] plays … everywhere informed by Ovid's fantastic, memorable tales’; Sean Keilen portrays Shakespeare as an author who ‘makes the Ovidian texture and inflection of his writing clear during every phase of his career’; Jonathan Bate estimates that ‘approximately 90 per cent’ of Shakespeare's mythological allusions might well have ‘come from Ovid and would usually have been thought of by mythologically literate playgoers as Ovidian’; and Judith Dundas, construing the early modern author's many ‘mythological allusions … not merely [as] the product and sign of his grammar school training but of his response to the poetic spirit of Ovid’, has proposed that ‘Shakespeare appropriated Ovid as no other poet has done’.

In Act 4, scene 4 of Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona, Julia – here cross-dressed as Proteus’ emissary ‘Sebastian’ – famously fabricates an account of a dramatic production. S/he regales an unwitting romantic rival (Silvia) with details of a purely fictitious entertainment that was allegedly staged alongside other ‘pageants of delight’ for the Veronese court at Pentecost. Claiming to have personally performed a female part in this drama, Julia-as-Sebastian informs Silvia that s/he ‘was trimmed in Madam Julia's gown’ for the role, a garment which, naturally, fit ‘As if … made for’ the actor. Further expounding upon the precise nature of the ‘lamentable part’ s/he played in this fanciful piece, Julia-as-Sebastian relates: ‘’twas Ariadne, passioning / For Theseus’ perjury and unjust flight; / Which I so lively acted with my tears’.

As audiences of The Two Gentlemen of Verona have often noted, the implications of Julia-as-Sebastian and Silvia's Act 4, scene 4 exchange are dizzying, and recent scholarship has delighted in the tangled web of gender and identity politics suggested by this imaginary Pentecost play. After all, this verbal report was originally written for delivery by a boy actor playing a female character (Julia) cross-dressed as a male youth (Sebastian) who is providing an account of a non-existent theatrical event in which ‘he’ played a female role (Ariadne) and during which ‘he’ was supposedly costumed in Julia's own garments. What is more, speaking in the third person, Julia-as- Sebastian also describes watching ‘Julia’, as she took in this imaginary play: the Veronese gentlewoman was reportedly ‘moved therewithal’ and ‘Wept bitterly’ when she saw Ariadne's tragedy staged. The emotional responses attributed to ‘Julia’ and ‘Sebastian’ here are vertiginously reciprocal. Just as ‘Julia’ is supposed to have been brought to tears while watching ‘Sebastian’ animate the well-known amatory distress of a mythological heroine, ‘Sebastian’ correspondingly claims ‘To think upon [Julia's] woes I do protest / That I have wept a hundred several times’ and emphatically insists ‘would I might be dead / If I in thought felt not [Julia's] very sorrow’.