How The Merry Wives of Windsor drew on Metamorphoses
A documented line of influence: William Shakespeare demonstrably engaged Ovid’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Metamorphoses
Ovid · 8
Ancient RomeThe influenced
The Merry Wives of Windsor
William Shakespeare · c. 1597
ShakespeareRelevance
7/10
On The Merry Wives of Windsor’s page
- The cuckold's-horns climax at Herne's Oak is Ovid's Diana-and-Actaeon myth in disguise — the antlered man hunted down by his own pursuers
- Pistol names the hound 'Ringwood', a dog-name lifted straight from Arthur Golding's English Metamorphoses — the smoking gun that Shakespeare had Ovid's text in hand
- Knowing the Actaeon myth turns Falstaff's antlers from a sight gag into a punishment with a 1,500-year pedigree
On Metamorphoses’s page
- Ovid's Actaeon — the hunter who glimpses Diana and is turned to a stag, then torn apart by his own hounds — is the engine of Shakespeare's climax
- Falstaff's humiliation at Herne's Oak is Actaeon played for farce: the fat knight crowned with antlers, hunted by the very wives he tried to seduce
- The proof of the debt is a single word — Pistol's hound 'Ringwood', a name found only in Golding's English Metamorphoses, the version Shakespeare read