Abstract

Treating Shakespeare’s and Ovid’s literary representations of botanical transformations, with attention to Shakespeare’s distinguishing plaguetime context, I examine several examples of Shakespeare’s representation of failed and successful botanical transformations, with focus on Ophelia’s, which closes this paper. Hers is one that Shakespeare attends to with extra care in each of its aspects, complexly detailing its pre-conditions, material manifestation, witness-reporting, and after-effects. Alone among others represented by premodern writers, Ophelia’s transformation is better considered as a botanical tribute and triumph and, more powerfully still, as a gift of “botanical grace” that has continued to signify over centuries.

Keywords: burial, plague, oppression, Ovid, memorialization, gift

…Ovid’s narrative takes the absolute equals sign of metaphor (Clytie is a flower) and explores the graduated process of selection involved in metaphoric translation: the dissimilar features between girl and flower are suppressed; their analogous features are made more nearly identical, even though (and very importantly) at translation’s end traces of the girl’s physical and emotional identity remain firmly intact.