Ovid and the Liberty of Speech in Shakespeare's England

The range of poetic invention that occurred in Renaissance English literature was vast, from the lyric eroticism of the late sixteenth century to the rise of libertinism in the late seventeenth century. Heather James argues that Ovid, as the poet-philosopher of literary innovation and free speech, was the galvanizing force behind this extraordinary level of poetic creativity. Moving beyond mere topicality, she identifies the ingenuity, novelty and audacity of the period's poetry as the political inverse of censorship culture. Considering Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, Milton and Wharton among many others, the book explains how free speech was extended into the growing domain of English letters, and thereby presents a new model of the relationship between early modern poetry and political philosophy.

• Emphasizes, in contrast to the standard critical model of male competition, the collaboration and collective enterprise that took place among those early modern writers who engaged in classical imitation and innovation
• Identifies the liberty of speech as the galvanizing principle of poetic innovation in the English Renaissance, proposing a new view of the relationship between early modern poetry and political philosophy
• Establishes Ovid's simultaneously creative and polemical form of engagement with literary and social history and accounts for his status as the most imitated and adapted poet of the Augustan age in Renaissance England