How Troilus and Cressida 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
Troilus and Cressida
William Shakespeare · c. 1602
ShakespeareRelevance
5/10
On Troilus and Cressida’s page
- Shakespeare's deflated Ajax — "a dolt and grossehead" — and his scheming Ulysses owe as much to Ovid as to Homer
- The source is Ovid's "Judgement of Arms" (Book 13), the contest where eloquence beats raw strength: read it first and the play's poisoned rhetoric lands sharper
- Golding's Metamorphoses was one of Shakespeare's favorite books; this play is him turning Ovid's brute-and-rhetorician pair against the heroic myth itself
On Metamorphoses’s page
- One of Shakespeare's favorite books — he read the Metamorphoses in Golding's 1567 English, and it shows
- Ovid's courtroom "Judgement of Arms" in Book 13 hands Shakespeare his blunt, blustering Ajax and his "sly Ulysses" — the brute and the rhetorician
- Troilus and Cressida recasts that contest into its sour anatomy of Greek heroism, with Orpheus-and-Eurydice echoes underneath