Introduction

The introduction conceptualises Spenser and Shakespeare’s Ovidian preoccupation with transformations within what Victor Turner terms ‘the behaviour of an innovative, liminal creature’. It pays particular attention to the presence of violence within the scholarly concepts of the festive or the carnival and introduces bi theory as a subset of queer theory and the preaching of Thomas Adams as a key primary source. The introduction also includes case studies on Ovidian fluidity and transformative power in the form of a close reading of the marriage of the Thames and Medway from Book IV of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and a comparison of Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos.