Ovid’s poem about the art of seduction, Ars Amatoria (‘The Art of Love’), was disliked by the Emperor Augustus, who was already worried about extramarital sex and the rise of loose morals in Rome. His work Ars Amatoria proved controversial to say the least, and led to his exile. Ovid is everywhere in Shakespeare’s work.Ĥ. Think of Bottom’s head being turned into an ass’s head in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or Hermione’s ‘statue’ coming to life at the end of The Winter’s Tale. This influence can be seen most clearly perhaps in plays like Titus Andronicus and narrative poems like The Rape of Lucrece, although Shakespeare’s continual obsession with transformation, with people changing into other people and other things – with, in a word, metamorphosis – can be traced to his grammar-school education in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he would have read Ovid’s work.

Ovid has been called Shakespeare’s favourite poet, and in his book Shakespeare and Ovid (Clarendon Paperbacks), Jonathan Bate has outlined the extent of Ovid’s influence on the Bard. Ovid’s work, especially his magnum opus, the Metamorphoses, would have a huge influence on Shakespeare. Nearly 2,000 years before Tennyson and Browning developed the dramatic monologue in the mid-nineteenth century, Ovid was in fact doing something strikingly similar – and, for his time, very innovative – by writing in the voice of numerous heroines from legend in his work the Heroides.ģ. Ovid has also been described as the originator of the dramatic monologue form.