Description:A schoolbook that provided many sources for ideas in plays and poems
One of the first books that Shakespeare experienced at Stratford grammar school was the Metamorphosis of Ovid. Written in Latin at the time of the Emperor Augustus it tells of a series of mythical transformations. These stories that Shakespeare learned in his Latin lessons gave him many ideas and points of reference that he was later to use in his plays and poems. Arthur Golding’s translation into English, first published in 1603, was particularly popular with his contemporaries.
The header and the first lines read:
THE FIRST BOOKE OF OVIDS METAMORPHOSIS,
translated into Englyshe Meter.
Of shapes transformde to bodies strange, I purpose to entreat,
Ye gods vouchsafe (for you are they wrought this wondrous feat)
To further this mine enterprise. And from the world begun,
Grant that my verse may to my time, his course directly run
Before the sea and land were made, and Heaven that all doth hide,
In all the world one only face of nature did abide,
Which Chaos hight [was called], a huge rude heap, and nothing else but even
A heavy lump and cluttered clod of seeds together driven,
Of things at strife among themselves, for want of order due.
No sun as yet with lightsome beams the shapeless world did view. ... [I.10]
No Moon in growing did repair her horns with borrowed light.
Nor yet the earth amidst the air did hang by wondrous slight
Just poised by her proper weight. Nor winding in and out
Did Amphitrytee with her arms embrace the earth about.
For where was earth, was sea and air, so was the earth unstable,
The air all dark, the sea likewise to bear a ship unable.
No kind of thing had proper shape, but each confounded other.
For in one selfsame body strove the hot and cold together,
The moist with dry, the soft with hard, the light with things of weight…
Full title: Publius Ovidius Naso, The XV [15] bookes of P. Ovidius Naso, entituled Metamorphosis. Translated out of Latine into English meeter, by Arthur Golding, Imprinted at London by W. W[hite], 1603.