METAMETAMORPHOSES

An unorthodox look at Shake-Speare’s inspirational source—The 1567 ‘Golding’ translation of Ovid’s MetamorphosesNewly adapted and annotated by Golding’s nephew, Ned DevereDid Arthur Golding translate Ovid’s masterpiece?In 8 CE the Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso, Ovid, completed his greatest work, Metamorphoses. In 1567 the first full English translation of this Latin poem was published. Ovid’s tales of transformation were themselves transformed with spirit and wit into rhymed lines of iambic heptameter. The work was credited to Arthur Golding, a zealous Protestant, translator of John Calvin’s sermons and other religious polemics. Ovid’s sexy, bloody, pagan poem full of misbehaving gods and supernatural shape-shifting was the outlier in Golding’s output, to say the least.But Arthur had a nephew, the precocious Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford after his father died in 1562. At that time twelve-year-old Ned left the home of his teacher Sir Thomas Smith (statesman, diplomat, educator, renowned scholar of Greek and Latin) for that of his new guardian, Queen Elizabeth’s right-hand man William Cecil. Robert Dudley (Earl of Leicester) held Ned’s legal wardship, and Golding was hired to manage his noble nephew’s properties. This brought Arthur into the periphery of the world of these two powerful men and the startlingly bright, already highly educated Oxford.So who really translated Metamorphoses? Ned himself answers the question, looking back at his early years and the roles that he, Smith, Cecil, Leicester, and Golding played in the poem’s creation and publication.All that comes after the poem. Ned’s new adaptation of the 1567 text still sounds old but no longer archaic, making it easier for readers to enjoy this important version of Ovid’s greatest work. Why important? Because this was the Metamorphoses that profoundly influenced Shakespeare, showing up time and time again in his poems and plays. Shakespeare (more accurately, Shake-Speare) knew the 1567 Metamorphoses as thoroughly as if he had translated it himself.In addition to the poem, METAMETAMORPHOSES includes Ned’s line-referenced annotations, an index of people and places in the poem, a glossary, biographical sketches of Ovid, Golding, and Smith, a list of Golding’s other work, and more.If you are among those rigidly convinced that William Shaksper of Stratford-upon-Avon wrote the works of Shake-Speare, you may not be willing to accept the idea that someone other than Arthur Golding translated Metamorphoses in the 1560s. But if you have an open mind, consider: what if the same person wrote it all? Read more