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Altered States: Ovid's Metamorphoses and Shakespeare's Dramatic Genres

Ovid's Metamorphoses tell of spectacular changes worked upon human bodies in moments of extremity. The changes may represent punish ments visited upon mortals by angry deities; they may serve as drastic rescues, aimed at delivering mortals from some impending danger; they may amount to deliverances from the sorrow and the pain of life. The metamorphosed shapes become part of nature: flowers, trees, birds, animals, insects, rocks, and — when occasion warrants — heavenly bodies. A powerful dynamism runs through all the tales in Ovid's poem. People are driven by whatever force has them in its power (or would seek to have them in its power) until they have reached the limits of their own endurance, or until the arrogance or the irreverence that they exhibit exceeds the limits of the god's tolerance; whereupon an end is decisively decreed to the old form of being which is now no longer tolerable to him or her who possesses it, or no longer acceptable to the powers that be. A new form — animate or inanimate — is decreed. In Ovid, the story usually stops here. The altered shape is absorbed into nature, or mixes forever with the elements, "rolled round in earth's diurnal course," as Wordsworth would say, and there we leave it. The metamorphoses that Shakespeare's principal characters undergo mark the crucial stages along the way to their dramatic fates. Here the transformations are spiritual and psychological, not physical as in Ovid. Shakespearean characters continue, for a time at least, to function in their altered states in the company of other men and