Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 76-07(E), Section: A.

Adviser: David Scott Kastan.

Access restricted by licensing agreement.

This item must not be sold to any third party vendors.

Allusions, simultaneously more fertile and more fleeting than other poetic techniques, provide a unique way to investigate and understand the very creation of literary meaning. Requiring the intention of an author, the presence of a source text, and the interpretation of an audience, literary allusions defy simple explanation. As the etymology of the term itself implies, allusions necessarily introduce play into a text: an outside text comes into play, and the multiple potential meanings available to an audience lacking uniform familiarity with the source text leave space for interpretive play that critics must take into account. Shakespeare's plays and poems display particularly rich interplay with a single source text: Ovid's Metamorphoses. Massively popular in renaissance English society, and thematically central to Shakespeare's conception of changefulness, Ovid's masterpiece provides the lens through which this dissertation analyzes and contextualizes the depth and development of Shakespeare's allusiveness.

The introductory chapter works toward a definition and historicization of allusion generally and the reception of Ovid specifically. Historically, it distinguishes allusion from a number of other early modern intertextual practices, particularly imitation and commonplacing. Unlike the former, allusion draws explicit attention to its borrowing; unlike the latter, allusion brings contextual meanings into play beyond the narrow, sententious, commonplace. Having established allusion as its own technique, the introduction then situates it in the field of Elizabethan rhetorical theory among the hundreds of various techniques enumerated by rhetoricians like Peacham and Puttenham. More theoretically, attention then turns to the ongoing debate between Jonathan Bate and Charles Martindale over allusion's capability to call upon an audience to import additional contextual meaning. An analysis of readers' marginalia in early copies of Golding's translation of the Metamorphoses analyzes precisely what contextual meanings an original audience could have imagined, establishing the lack of any clear answer. Dramatic poetry, it is argued, holds the key to this debate by providing us with fictionalized representations of allusions and audiences: meta-allusion.

The next two chapters investigate this concept of meta-allusion within the pairing of Shakespeare's first published poem, Venus and Adonis , and his first published play, Titus Andronicus. These works, masterpieces in the artisanal sense of the word, display the full extent to which Ovidian allusion saturates Shakespeare's creative mindset from the very beginning. This saturation is far from a whole-hearted embrace of allusive technique, however, as each work deploys meta-allusive strategies that serve to identify and interrogate the potential dangers that accompany allusive authorship -- namely, ignorance and excess. The former informs Venus and Adonis, as the titular goddess repeatedly, unsuccessfully, attempts to effect seduction via allusion. Titus Andronicus provides uniquely direct dramatizations of allusive authorship and reception alike, dramatizations that cluster around the play's relationship with Ovid's tale of Philomela's rape and revenge, alluding directly to the source. All characters use allusion somehow, but not necessarily with equal skill or morality. Via meta-allusion, Shakespeare calls upon us to recognize the intentionality of allusions even if the characters miss them, providing instruction on how to interpret Shakespeare's art.

My fourth chapter applies the lessons learned from a study of meta-allusion to an extended analysis of the malleability of one myth across several different plays. A close reading of the Actaeon story as it appears in Titus, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Twelfth Night shows just how much interpretive play exists within a given literary reference. The Actaeon myth was particularly popular in the English renaissance, but that did not make its meaning fixed -- the tale could be construed either in a comic way or in a highly serious one. This serious interpretation was subdivided into readings that favored either Diana or Actaeon; those that castigated the latter broke down even further by laying the blame on one of several moral failings -- sexual immodesty and slothfulness being the two most common. It makes perfect sense that this last subcategory should come into play regarding Falstaff, but how can we reconcile that interpretation of the myth with one that turns the blameless couple of Bassanio and Lavinia into brutalized victims? Only by relying on an audience to recognize multiple possibilities could Shakespeare make such varied use of the single locus.

With the foregoing chapters having established a methodology for interpreting Shakespeare's allusions according to the principles of ambiguity and free interpretive play that Shakespeare himself communicates to his audience, an afterword provides a look at how this methodology can improve our understanding of no less a problem than that of Hamlet's delaying, inconsistent character.