SOURCE: “Ovid's Metamorphoses and Shakespeare's Twelfth Night,” in Shakespearean Comedy, edited by Maurice Charney, New York Literary Forum, 1980, pp. 63-77.

In the following essay, Lamb studies Shakespeare's use of internalized metamorphosis in his representation of Orsino and Olivia, as well as his application of “Ovidian” rhetoric in Twelfth Night.

The contradictory attitudes held toward Ovid in the Renaissance complicate the relationship between Ovid's Metamorphoses and Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, or What You Will. According to one tradition-rooted in the Middle Ages and continuing vigorously into the seventeenth century, Ovid was a didactic teacher whose tales were really allegorical lessons about the human soul. Twelfth Night can be interpreted as a play about change within the souls of Orsino, Olivia, and Viola,¹ and metamorphosis serves as a metaphor for an inner spiritual state revealing that love can lead to either stasis or transcendence. The second Ovid, the urbane Ovid of...