ABSTRACT
Staging Ovid The vernacular translations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in early modern England are witness to ways in which ‘the foreign text is inscribed with linguistic and cultural values that are intelligible to specific domestic constituencies’.1 It is not only in the texts that these ideological inscriptions occur: ‘the process […] operates at every stage in the production, circulation and reception’.2 However, in this chapter it is not a translation that I want to consider. Rather, I want to explore William Shakespeare’s The Most Lamentable Roman Tragedie of Titus Andronicus (c. 1594) as an arena in which the construction and contestation of Elizabethan identities are violently dramatized. Shakespeare’s spectacularly tragic tale of Titus Andronicus occupies a significant place in terms of Ovid and the Cultural Politics of Translation in Early Modern England. Both temporally and textually, translation processes frame Titus Andronicus. Eugene Vance has written that:
if translation in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance may be said by us to have a history, writers of those periods saw history itself as a process of translation: hence, the twin doctrines of translatio imperii and translatio studii in medieval and Renaissance culture.3
