SOURCE: "Shakespeare and the Renaissance Ovid," in his Shakespeare and Ovid, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1993, pp. 1-47.

In the following essay, Bate examines the profound influence of Ovid on Renaissance culture and Shakespeare's works. The critic additionally provides an overview of the Elizabethan educational system, describing the emphasis placed on memorizing and imitating Latin literary models.

We need stories to help us make sense of the world. Things change. Men and women are driven, powerfully if not exclusively, by sexual desire (men in more aggressive ways). Myth, metamorphosis, sexuality: doubtless Shakespeare knew something about them by instinct; as a young man who got an older woman pregnant and then married her, he must have known a good deal about one of them from experience; but much of his most profound and characteristic thinking about them was derived from his reading of Ovid.

The enchantment which the law...