{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.04013810962451446, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0073370738023306, 'mean_word_length': 4.883248730964467, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Ovid, Pettie, and the Mythic Foundation of Cymbeline

When Shakespeare wrote Cymbeline he drew from a large, incongruous group of relatively modern sources, ranging from Boccaccio to Holinshed.i The works of Ovid, however, continued to exert a powerful, though perhaps less obvious, shaping force on the poetic vision of the later Shakespeare. Jonathan Bate's comprehensive new study, which very likely will be definitive, confirms what previous studies have suggested: namely, that Shakespeare's handling of myth, which is "highly self-conscious" in the early poems, becomes, in the later plays, more subtle and more evocative.z In his discussions of the late romances, Bate stresses The Winters Tale and The Tempest; Cymbeline is discussed only briefly, perhaps because so much has been said already about the mythic qualities of this play (pp. 215--70). Its unusual "fecundity of classical, and especially mythological, reference" was noted long ago by G. Wilson Knight.s More recently, David Armitage and Joan Carr have shown how the myth of Orpheus informs some of the play's major movements; and Ann Thompson, in a similar vein, has treated the thematic importance of the story of Tereus and Procne, Imogen's bedtime reading. 4 What all of these studies show, however, is that when Shakespeare evokes a myth in the romances, he is not merely displaying his learning or adorning his plot. Rather, at this mature stage the "decorative spangling" of the early poems, as Armitage puts it, has developed into "concealed fertile allusion,'" for myth is now "more integral to the poetic fiber of the plays" (p. 125). Indeed, so integral is myth to the poetic fiber of Cymbeline that, as I hope to show, its very plot may be a deeply concealed Ovidian allusion. My purpose in the following study, then, is threefold: first, to show that when Shakespeare wrote Cymbeline he intended to evoke Ovid's story of Cephalus and Procris; second, to suggest that he used not only the version in the Metamorphoses: but also the one in George Pettie's Petite Pallace (1576);6 and third, to explain why the Shakespeare of Cymbeline might have been drawn to this most tragic Ovidian story. For the pursuit of sources, as Bullough says, "should be the first stage in an investigation of Shakespeare's methods of composition" (p. 342).