A look into Shakespeare as a Renaissance man: his inspiration and background in classical antiquity (esp. Ovid's Metamorphoses)

1. Shakespeare
A Renaissance Man?
Kees IJzerman, February 2015

2. Let’s start at home…….
Pyramus and Thisbe
By Lucas van Gassel
1540-1550
Gemeentemuseum
Helmond

3. Pyramus and Thisbe ( )
• Grew up next door to one another
• Families quarreled
• Talked through a crack in the garden wall
• Agreed to meet in the graveyard under mulberry tree
• Thisbe early; lioness with bloody jaw; she hides in cave; loses mantle
• Lioness tears mantle; Pyramus arrives & sees bloodied mantle
• P kills himself; Th comes out of cave; sees dying P and kills herself.
• Reminds you of a story?

4. Ovid
• Metamorphoses (AD 1)
• 1565 translation into English
• Shakespeare used it as an inspiration (as did Chaucer earlier)
• Romeo and Juliet / A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• Admiration for and finding inspiration in the Art of the ancients was
of course a characteristic of the Renaissance.
• But is there more?

5. Shakespeare as a Renaissance man
• Inspiration for plays in ancient Greek and Roman art (introduction)
• Inspiration for poems in the same
• Science
• Philosophy

6. Shakespeare as a Renaissance Man
Poetry
• Venus and Adonis (Ovid)
• The Rape of Lucrece (Ovid and Livy)
Both of these narrative poems were written
when theatres were closed b.o. the plague.
• Sonnets

7. Shakespeare as a Renaissance Man
Poetry - Sonnets
• Petrarch (Laura Sonnets) < Ovid
(abba abba cde cde or abba abba cdc dcd)
• Shakespeare perfected and adapted the form: Shakespearean Sonnets
(abab cdcd efef gg)
• Shakespearean sonnet not based upon the Ancients
(apart from 153 and 154; translations)

8. Shakespeare as a Renaissance Man
2. Poetry - Sonnets
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st;
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Man is more (lovely etc.) than nature
YOUR beauty is eternal,
as opposed to that of the sun
Anthropocentric = Renaissance!

9. Shakespeare as a Renaissance Man - Science
• From Romeo and Juliet:
O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
She is the fairies' midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Athwart men's noses as they lie asleep;
Her wagon-spokes made of long spinners' legs,
The cover of the wings of grasshoppers,
The traces of the smallest spider's web,
What did The
Bard know about
atoms???

10. Shakespeare as a Renaissance Man - Science
• Lucretius poem ‘De Rerum Natura’ (‘On the Nature of Things’)
• Epicurus (~300 B.C.):
- Everything consist of invisible particles (atoms).
- They are eternal.
- They are in motion in an otherwise empty space (void).
- the universe has no creator and is not for or about humans.
- the soul dies & there is no afterlife.
- organised religion is a superstition.
- religions are cruel (retribution; children sacrificed by a parent).
Needless to say: the catholic Church wanted to repress these thoughts
and the poem containing them.

11. Shakespeare as a Renaissance Man - Science
• Arguably, Shakespeare knew about Galileo’s heliocentric model.
(He has, for example, Jupiter surrounded by four moons.)
• Hamlet can be read as a metaphor for the controversy between the
old geocentric vs. the new heliocentric model.

12. Shakespeare as a Renaissance Man - Philosophy
• “To thine own self be true”
• “We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.”
• “Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
Quotes like these show that
Shakespeare had no time for an
‘afterlife’ We die.
That’s where it ends.
This is an distinctly unreligious
thought.

13. Shakespeare as a Renaissance Man – So, was he?
• Both plays and poems lean heavily on Ovid.
• He was aware of ancient scientific and philosophical ideas.
• He was aware of scientific progress.
• Both sonnets and plays contain humanistic ideas
• Shakespeare was very much a man of his time!