4. The Use and Abuse of Virgil and Ovid

About this Lecture

Lecture

In this lecture, Zurcher turns to Shakespeare's treatment of two other Latin sources, Ovid's Metamorphoses and Virgil's Aeneid. Symbolic and metaphoric passages from the works of both writers are shown to have been cut out, materialised and hyperbolised, and stripped of their original meanings so that they might be recombined in a dismembered parody of the original.

Course

In Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare's first tragedy, the fragmentation of sacrificed and mutilated bodies gives rise to a polyphony of dismemberment. Over the course of these six lectures, Andrew Zurcher explores how Shakespeare figures the fragmentation of flesh and limb; of literary sources and philosophical systems; of language and rhetoric; and of the genre of tragedy itself. Shakespeare's brash and violent play emerges from these lectures as a trenchant satire of time-honoured tragic conventions, a relentless critique of any attempt to dignify and aestheticise spectacles of violence.

Lecturer

Andrew work on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature, with a particular focus on the works of Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, and William Shakespeare. His research to date has emphasised early modern legal history, Elizabethan colonial and military activity in Ireland, textual studies (including palaeography and manuscript studies), the sixteenth-century reception of Academic and Pyrrhonist epistemology, early modern secretarial practice, and the theory and practice of allegory in the sixteenth century. He is currently working on several editorial projects: (with Christopher Burlinson) an edition of Ralph Kenvet's 1635 A Supplement of the Faery Queene; several editions of the works of Edmund Spenser; and (with Anne Dunan Page) the letters of Sir Thomas Browne for a new Collected Works under the general care of Claire Preston. He is also editing sixteenth-century materials for OUP's Oxford Scholarly Editions Online project.