Ovid from the RSC: The World's Greatest Storyteller

This year marks 2,000 years since the death of the Roman poet Ovid,

one of the greatest storytellers of all time.

His Metamorphoses, with its mythological tales of transformations,

has transfixed readers and inspired artists ever since,

including William Shakespeare.

I'm Greg Doran, artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company,

and this autumn, we're looking at Ovid's influence on our house playwright.

One contemporary wrote,

"The witty soul of Ovid lives in the mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare."

I've been working with a group of actors to explore some of

the key stories from the Metamorphoses,

translated by Ted Hughes amongst others.

First up is Simon Russell Beale with a speech by Ovid's sorceress Medea.

Here, she proclaims her power to rule over nature and shows the full

extent of her magical witchcraft.

References to Medea occur in plays like The Merchant Of Venice and

Titus Andronicus, and the tale even inspired a famous passage

from The Tempest.

Ye airs and winds, the elves of hills of brooks, of woods alone,

of standing lakes, and of the night, approach ye every one.

Through help of whom, the crooked banks much wondering at the thing,

I have compelled streams to run clean backward to their spring.

By charms, I make the calm seas rough and make the rough seas plane.

And cover all the sky with clouds and chase them thense again.

And from the bowels of the Earth, both stones and trees do draw.

Whole woods and forests I remove.

I make the mountains shake and even the Earth itself to groan and

fearfully to quake.

I call up dead men from their graves,

and thee, O lightsome Moon,

I darken oft, though beaten brass abate thy peril soon.

The flaming breath of fiery bulls ye quenched for my sake and cause to

unwieldy necks the bended yoke to take.

Among the Earth-bred brothers, you a mortal ward did set.

There is, right at the end of Shakespeare's career in the

last solely-authored play,

The Tempest, there is a very, very direct borrowing from Ovid.

In fact, it's from Medea, and I remember us,

when we were rehearsing The Tempest last year, reading that.

And it being a bit of a surprise.

Yeah.

Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves.

What Shakespeare's done, it's always fascinating what he does with this

sort of material, isn't it?

He's sort of smoothed the argument so it has a good, wonderful

Porsche-like, Rolls-Royce acceleration through the speech.

Of course, the two-most or three-most,

four-most famous lines in the speech are in fact entirely Shakespeare's

invention, which is when Prospero breaks his staff and gives up his powers.

But it means that the speech has a different...

Has a regret about it, has a self-congratulatory element, of course,

but it's also about what I did in the past and what I am now going to

give up, which is a whole different tone to Medea thundering against...

..you know, flexing her muscles against her own miserable situation.

But this rough magic...

..I hear abdure.

And when I have required some heavenly music,

which even now I do to work mine end upon their senses that this airy

charm is for...

I'll break my staff.

Bury it.

Set fathoms in the Earth.

And deeper than did ever plummet sound.

I'll drown my book.

I mean, it's a wonderful speech and I enjoyed playing it, as you know,

more than I can say.

One of the most heartbreaking stories from the Metamorphoses is the tale

of Proserpina. While gathering flowers one day, she's snatched away

by the Lord of Hell to be his wife in the underworld.

As Hannah Morrish here narrates,

from the peerless translation by Ted Hughes, Proserpina's mother Ceres,

the goddess of the harvest, tries to rescue her.

But the young girl's simple act of eating a pomegranate traps her in

Hell for half the year.

Shakespeare echoes Proserpina's flower-gathering

in characters like Ophelia and Perdita in The Winter's Tale.

Near Enna's walls is a deep lake known as Pergusa.

Trees encircling it knit their boughs

to protect it from the sun's flame.

Their leaves nurse a glade of cool shade

where it is always spring with spring's flowers.

Proserpina was playing in that glade with her companions.

..excitedly among lilies and violets.

She was heaping the fold of her dress with the flowers,

hurrying to pick more, to gather most,

piling more than any of her friends into baskets.

There, the Lord of Hell suddenly saw her.

In the sweep of a single glance, he fell in love

and snatched her away.

Terrified, she screamed for her mother

and screamed to her friends,

but louder and again and again to her mother.

She ripped her frock from her throat downwards

so all her cherished flowers scattered in a shower.

Then, in her childishness,

she screamed for her flowers as they fell

while her ravisher leapt with her into his chariot.

They were gone,

leaving the ripped turf and the shocked faces.

In despair, Ceres ransacked the earth.

No dawn sodden with dew ever found her resting.

The evening star never found her weary.

The lands and the seas across which Ceres roamed

make too long a list.

Searching the whole earth,

she found herself right back where she had started, Sicily.

She ripped her hair out in knots,

she hammered her breasts with her clenched fists,

yet still she knew nothing of where her daughter might be.

She accused every country on earth,

reproached them all for their ingratitude,

called them unworthy of their harvests.

Then, Arathusa, the nymph that Alpheus loved,

lifted her head from her pool,

swept back her streaming hair,

and called to Ceres,

"Great Mother of earth's harvests,

"you who have searched through the whole world

"for your vanished daughter, you have laboured enough.

"But have raged too much against the earth,

"which was always loyal to you.

"The earth is innocent.

"While I was under the earth,

"as I slid through the Stygian pool in the underworld,

"I felt myself reflecting a face that looked down at me.

"It was your Proserpina.

"She was not happy.

"Her face was pinched with fear.

"Nevertheless...

"She is the reigning consort of Hell's tyrant."

Ceres seemed to be turning to stone as she listened.

For a long time, she was like stone.

Then her stupor was shattered by a scream of fury

as she leapt into her chariot.

Jupiter was astonished when she materialised in front of him,

her hair one wild snarl of disarray,

her face inflamed and swollen with sobbing,

and her voice hacking at him, attacking.

"If her mother's pleas are powerless,

"maybe her father's heart will stir for her."

The high god answered calmly...

.."I love our daughter no less than you do.

"I am bound to her by blood no less than you are.

"But see things as they stand.

"Let your words fit the facts.

"Once you accept him, this is a son-in-law to be proud of.

"Even if he were worthless, he is still the brother of Jupiter.

"As it is, in everything, he is my equal,

"only not so lucky in the lottery

"that gave Heaven to me and Hell to him.

"Still, if you are determined to take her from him,

"you can have her, but on one condition.

"The sole condition fixed by the Fates is this.

"She can return to Heaven on condition, hear me, on condition,

"that she never tasted Hell's food."

Jupiter finished.

And Ceres was away to collect her daughter,

but the Fates stopped her.

Proserpina had eaten something.

Absently straying through Pluto's overloaded orchard...

..picked its hard rind open,

and sucked the glassy flesh from seven seeds.

Almost nothing,

but more than enough.

So, closing Hell's gates on Proserpina.

Now, Jupiter intervened between his brother

and his grieving sister.

He parted the years round into two halves.

From this day, Proserpina,

the goddess who shares both kingdoms,

divides her year between her husband in Hell among spectres

and her mother on earth among flowers.

Her nature, too, is divided.

One moment gloomy as Hell's king, but the next...

Of course, at the end of the Proserpina story,

so she has been dragged down to the underworld.

Her mother, Ceres,

rampages the earth, causing devastation,

to try and find her daughter.

Eventually discovers that she has been taken down to the underworld

and pleads with Jupiter

to release her, and he says,

"Yes, you can release her on one condition,

"that she hasn't eaten anything while she was in the underworld."

And, lo and behold, we discover that she's had seven pips,

seven little seeds from a pomegranate.

And, therefore, she can't come back.

But the deal is made

that she can come back for six months of the year.

Six months she has to spend in winter in her gloom,

and six months she can spend in the flowery summer

when her whole personality changes.

It makes her quite schizophrenic as a personality.

It's the worst custody settlement of all time!

This poor daughter! "Do I have to go down there?

"I'm sorry, it's really cold down there.

"There's spectres and there's devils"

"I much prefer it at your place. Don't make me go, don't make me go!"

The most gruesome tale in the Metamorphoses

must be Philomel and Tereus,

about a king so overcome by lust

for his wife's sister, that he rapes her.

With a plot that heavily influenced Titus Andronicus,

a play currently in performance at the RSC,

the story describes King Tereus

ripping out Philomel's tongue so she can tell no-one what happened.

But she manages to inform her sister, the Queen Procne,

and they conspire to murder the King's son Itys

and serve him up to his father cooked in a pie.

Antony Byrne tells the whole story here,

which will climax in the transformation

of the three protagonists, Tereus, Philomel and Procne, into birds.

When Tereus, the great King of Thrace,

married Procne and begot Itys,

Procne spoke to her husband, stroking his face.

"If you love me, give me the perfect gift,

"the sight of my sister."

At a command from Tereus, oar and sail brought him to Athens.

Tereus began to explain his unexpected arrival,

how Procne longed for one glimpse of her sister.

But just as he was promising the immediate return of Philomela,

there, mid-sentence, Philomela herself...

..arrayed in the wealth of the kingdom, entered.

Still unaware that her own beauty

was the most astounding of her jewels.

Tereus felt his blood alter thickly.

His first thought was simply to grab her and carry her off,

and fight to keep her.

The sun went down.

A royal banquet glittered and steamed.

The guests, replete, slept.

Only the Thracian king Tereus tossed,

remembering Philomela's every gesture.

Remembering...

And seeming to see every part of her garments concealed...

..just as he wanted it.

So, he fed his lust...

..and stared at the darkness.

The oar was bent, and the wake broadened behind the painted ship.

Philomela watched the land sinking, but Tereus laughed softly.

"I've won. My prayers are granted. She's mine."

The moment the ship touched his own shore,

Tereus lifted Philomela onto a horse

and hurried her to a fort behind high walls hidden in deep forest.

And there he imprisoned her.

Bewildered and defenceless,

failing to understand anything and in a growing fear of everything,

she begged him to bring her to her sister.

His answer was to rape her,

ignoring her screams to her father,

to her sister, to the gods.

Afterwards, she crouched in a heap, shuddering.

She clawed her hair and pounded her breasts with a fist

shrieking at him, "You disgusting savage! You sadistic monster!

"The gods are watching.

"If they bother to notice what has happened,

"if they are more than the puffs of air that go with their names,

"then you will answer for this!

"And shame will not stop me!

"I shall tell everything to your own people, yes, to all Thrace.

"Even if you keep me here...

"The dumb rocks will witness, all Heaven will be my jury,

"every god in Heaven will judge you!"

Tereus was astonished to be defied and raged at

and insulted by a human being.

He hauled her up by the hair,

twisted her arms behind her back

and bound them, then drew his sword.

As he caught her tongue with bronze pincers,

dragged it out to its full length...

..and cut it off at the root.

The stump recoiled, silenced,

into the back of her throat.

But the tongue squirmed in the dust, babbling on,

shaping words that were now soundless.

Then, stuffing the whole hideous business deep among his secrets,

he came home, smooth-faced, to his wife.

When she asked for her sister...

..he gave her the tale he had prepared.

She was dead.

His grief as he wept convinced everybody.

A year went by.

Philomela, staring at the massive stone walls

and stared at by her guards, was still helpless.

She set up a Thracian loom,

and wove on a white fabric scarlet symbols

that told in detail what had happened to her.

A servant who understood her gestures, but...

..took this gift to Procne, the queen.

The tyrant's wife unrolled the tapestry

and saw the only interpretation was the ruin of her life.

In those moments, her restraint was superhuman.

And tears were pushed aside by the devouring single idea of revenge.

Now came a festival of Bacchus,

celebrated every third year by the young women of Thrace.

Dressed as a worshipper, Procne joined to the uproar.

Berserk, she held herself through the darkness, terrifying.

So she found the hidden fort in the forest.

With howls to the god, her troupe tore down the gate,

and Procne freed her sister,

disguised her as a bacchante and brought her home to the palace.

She was out of her mind with anger.

"Oh, my sister, nothing now can soften the death

"Tereus is going to die.

"Let me break his jaw,

"hang him up by his tongue and saw it through with a broken knife.

"Then dig his eyes from their holes.

"However we kill him..."

While Procne raved,

Itys came in.

Her demented idea

caught hold of his image.

She whispered.

Silent, her heart ice,

she saw what had to be done.

Nevertheless, as he ran to her...

..calling to her,

..his five-year-old arms pulling at her to be kissed...

..and to kiss her, and chattering lovingly

through his loving laughter, her heart shrank.

She felt her love for this child softening her ferocious will.

And she turned to harden it,

staring at her sister's face.

Then looked back at Itys, and again at her sister, crying,

"He tells me all his love,

"but she has no tongue to utter a word of hers.

"He can call me mother, but she cannot call me sister."

Catching Itys by the arm,

she gave herself no more time to weaken.

He saw what was coming.

He tried to clasp her neck, screaming,

"Mama, Mama!"

But staring into his face...

..Procne pushed a sword through his chest.

Then, though that wind was fatal enough...

..slashed his throat.

Now, the two sisters ripped the hot little body

into pulsating gobbets.

The room was awash with blood as they cooked his remains.

A feast followed.

Procne invited one guest only - her husband.

Tereus, ignorant and happy,

lulled on the throne of his ancestors,

and swallowed with smiles all his posterity

as Procne served it up.

He was so happy, he called for his son to join him.

"Where's Itys? Bring him."

Procne could not restrain herself any longer.

"Your son," she said, "is here already.

"He could not be closer to you."

Tereus was mystified. He suspected some joke.

Perhaps Itys was hiding under his throne.

He called again. "Come out! Show yourself!"

The doors banged wide open.

Philomela burst into the throne room, her hair and gown bloody.

She rushed forward, and her dismembering hands,

red to the elbows,

jammed into the face of Tereus a crimson dripping ball.

The head of Itys.

He tugged at his ribcage as if he might writhe himself open

to empty out what he had eaten.

Then gripped his sword hilt and steadied himself.

As he saw the sisters running, he came after them,

and they who had been running seemed to be flying.

And suddenly they were...flying.

And Tereus, charging blind in his delirium

of grief and vengeance,

no longer caring what happened...

On his head and shoulders, a crest of feathers.

Instead of a sword, a long, curved beak,

like a warrior transfigured with battle frenzy dashing into battle.

He had become a...

Philomela mourned in the forest, a...

Procne lamented round and the palace...

Both you are currently in Titus Andronicus.

It must've been quite interesting

seeing just how closely the story reflects the play.

There is something about the language of it,

and the words that he uses, and the...

Possibly, it is the Ovid, as well as Ted Hughes,

but the getting inside the mind of Procne.

The rage, and inside the terror of Philomel.

I couldn't stop crying.

It's such an amazing story.

What Shakespeare doesn't do that Ovid does,

is allow the metamorphosis of Lavina that Philomel has.

She's able to...release from her suffering

and her pain through

becoming a nightingale and having that sort of transcendence.

Titus Andronicus really pushes it, doesn't it?

A girl is raped.

She has her hands cut off,

she has her tongue cut out.

That's pretty extreme.

Have you encountered responses from the audience?

Yeah, I spoke to a group of American students

who were really disconcerted

that there weren't any trigger warnings.

And I didn't know what they meant.

And they had to explain to me now that -

is this right for live theatre

and movies in the States? -

there is a warning before you go in

explicitly saying there are things

that will happen in this thematically

which might trigger an uncomfortable emotional response in you.

In 2015, students at the University of Columbia petitioned the staff,

apparently, that certain stories should be prefaced with -

and these were Ovid's Metamorphoses,

so Tereus And Philomel was one of them -

that there should be a trigger warning alerting readers

who might be disturbed by the violent sexual content.

It's interesting, isn't it,

-that Ovid has that power in the 21st century?

-Yeah.

Ovid's Metamorphoses have offered inspiration

to some of the greatest artists in history.

Perhaps most memorably, with the story of the hunter Actaeon,

depicted in the vivid canvases of Titian.

As Alex Waldmann reveals here,

after accidentally catching sight of the goddess of the hunt, Diana,

naked at her bath, Actaeon is transformed into a stag

and devoured by his own hounds, a fate Shakespeare alludes to

in passages from Twelfth Night and The Merry Wives Of Windsor.

Destiny, not guilt, was enough for Actaeon.

It's no crime to lose your way in a dark wood.

It happened on a mountain,

where hunters had slaughtered so many animals...

When shadows were shortest and the sun's heat hottest,

young Actaeon call a halt.

"We've killed more than enough for the day."

All concurred, and the hunt was over for the day.

A deep cleft at the bottom of the mountain,

dark with matted pine and spiky cypress, was known as Gargaphie,

sacred to Diana, goddess of the hunt.

Often to that grotto, aching and burning from her hunting,

Diana came to cool the naked beauty she hid from the world.

The goddess was there in her secret pool,

naked and bowed, under those cascades

from the mouths of jars, in the fastness of Gargaphie,

when Actaeon, making a beeline home from the hunt,

stumbled on this gorge.

Surprised to find it, he pushed into it.

Apprehensive, but...

..his nudgings he felt only as surges of curiosity.

So, he came to the clearing.

He peered into the gloom to see the waterfall...

..but what he saw were nymphs.

Their wild faces screaming at him in a commotion of water.

And as his eyes adjusted, he saw they were naked,

beating their breasts as they screamed at him.

And he saw they were crowding together to hide something from him.

He stared harder.

Those nymphs could not conceal Diana's whiteness.

The tallest barely reached her navel.

Actaeon stared at the goddess,

who stared at him.

She twisted her breasts away,

showing him her back,

glaring at him over her shoulder...

..in that twilit grotto of winking reflections,

and raged for a weapon,

for her arrows to drive through his body.

No weapon was to hand, only water, so she scooped up a handful

and dashed it into his astonished eyes as she shouted...

That was all she said.

But as she said it, out of his forehead burst a rack of antlers.

His neck lengthened, narrowed,

and his ears folded to whiskery points.

His hands were hooves.

His arms - long, slender legs,

his hunter's tunic slid from his dappled hide.

With all this, the goddess poured a shocking stream

of panicked terror through his heart like blood.

Actaeon bounded out across the cave's pool in plunging leaps,

amazed at his own likeness.

And there, clear in the bulging mirror of his bow wave,

he glimpsed his antlered head and cried,

"What has happened to me?"

No words came.

No sound came, but a groan.

His only voice was a groan, but then as he circled,

his own hounds found him.

The first to give tongue were Melampus,

and the Spartan-Cretan crossbreeds, Lebros and Agriodus,

Hylactor, with a high cracked voice

and a host of others.

Too many to name.

The strung-out pack locked onto their quarry,

flowed across the landscape over crags, over cliffs

where no man could have followed,

through places that seemed impossible,

where Actaeon had so often strained,

every hound to catch and kill the quarry.

Now he strained to shake the same hounds off.

His own hounds.

He tried to cry out...

But his tongue lolled wordless,

while the air belaboured his ears with hounds' voices.

Suddenly, three hounds appeared ahead, raving towards him.

They'd been last in the pack,

but they'd thought it out and made a short cut over a mountain.

As Actaeon turned,

Melanchaetes, the ringleader of this breakaway trio,

grabbed a rear ankle in the trap of his jaws.

These three pinned their master

as the pack poured onto him like an avalanche.

Every hound filled its jaws

until there was hardly a mouth

not gagged and crammed with hair and muscle.

Then begun the tugging and the ripping.

Actaeon's groan was neither human

nor the natural sound of a stag.

Now the hills he had played on so happily...

His head and antlers reared from the heaving pile.

But his friends, who had followed the pack to this unexpected kill,

urged them to finish the work.

Meanwhile, they shouted for Actaeon,

over and over for Actaeon to hurry

and witness this last kill of the day, and such a magnificent beast.

As if he were absent.

He heard his name and wished he were as far off as they thought him.

Only when Actaeon's life had been torn from his bones

to the last mouthful...

It wasn't Actaeon's fault that he strayed into that cavern

and saw Diana bathing.

It's... That beautiful image that Titian paints so beautifully

of Actaeon witnessing Diana and her nymphs,

and then being turned into a stag.

The attempt to try and get inside what it must feel like,

as a human being, to try and get right inside the human condition,

it's the humanity. It's always like,

"What's it's like to feel like that person at that moment

"with that happening to you?"

That moment of extreme is happening to you.

I guess, perhaps, that's why...

That's what myths are about.

It's the ability to...

To explore the human condition and human experience

and try and articulate what that actually means.

But the image of Actaeon is used in Twelfth Night, for instance,

without any reference to the name Actaeon,

as Orsino describes his passion for the Countess Olivia.

Ovid's stories provide morals in their narrative.

In the tale of Niobe, the proud Phrygian queen

is brought to her knees when she tells the world

that she is more fortunate than the goddess Leto

because Niobe has 14 children and Leto only two.

In Nia Gwynne's telling of the tale here,

we see that once Leto has effected the destruction

of Niobe's entire family,

the grief of the bereaved queen is so great

that she is transformed into a weeping mountain.

"All tears," as Hamlet says, "forever more."

Niobe was proud.

She was proud of the magical powers of her husband, Amphion, the king.

Her greatest pride was her family, her 14 children.

And it is true, Niobe, of all mothers,

would have been the most blessed

if only she had not boasted that she,

of all mothers, was the most blessed.

She looked magnificent,

like a great flame in her robes of golden tissue.

She reared her spectacular head,

her hair coiled and piled like a serpent asleep on a heap of jewels.

"Wherever my eyes rest in my house, they rest on fabulous wealth.

"Nor can it be denied...

"Tell me, how can I fear ill fortune?

"Even if it came to the worst, if I lost some of my children,

"I could never be left with only two. Only two!

"Two is all that Leto ever had!

"Two children?

"You might as well have none.

"Get rid of these laurels,

"back to your homes, finish with this nonsense.

"Finish, I say."

Leto was enraged.

She climbed to the top of Cynthus

and cried out to her children, the twins,

none other than Apollo and Diana,

so lightly dismissed by the Phrygian queen,

"Your mother is calling you!" she cried.

"Your mother, who is so proud of being your mother,

"in Heaven, I take second place to none except Juno herself.

"Your mother's divinity is being denied.

"The daughter of Tantalus

"has inherited all her father's blasphemous folly.

"She has not only emptied my temples,

"she drives me mad with insults, derision

"and tells the whole world her 14 children

"are a thousand times superior to my two

"Compared to her, I am childless.

"And, my children...

"Let her swallow its meaning."

Leto would have gone on but her great son, Apollo, spoke.

"Mother, your words merely prolong Niobe's delusion."

He exchanged a signal with his sister.

..till they hung over the city of Cadmus.

Outside the city, a broad plain smoked like a burning ground.

Niobe's sons were out there,

astride gaudy saddle cloths.

Ismenus, Niobe's eldest, was reining his horse hard,

bringing it round in a tight circle,

when his spine snapped

and a bellow forced his mouth open

as a broad-headed, bright-red arrow came clean through him.

The reins fell loose.

For a moment, he embraced the horse's neck limply

and then slid from its right shoulder.

Ilioneus was last.

He dropped to his knees and lifted his arms.

"You, gods!" He cried. "All of you, hear me!

"Spare me, protect me!"

It stopped his heart before he felt the impact.

Now the news came looking for Niobe.

..people huddling together then scattering

in an uproar of wails until, at last,

her own family burst in on her, shrieking.

This was no longer Niobe the queen who had driven her people,

as with a whip from Leto's altars.

Now even those who hated her...

..pitied her.

She bowed over the cooling bodies of her sons.

She kissed them as if she could give them a lifetime of kisses

in these moments.

She lifted her bruised arms.

"Leto!" She cried.

"Feast yourself on your triumph, which is my misery.

"I have died seven deaths at your hands..."

"..Gloat and exult and, yet, your victory is petty.

"Though you have crushed me, I'm still far,

"far more fortunate than you are.

"I still have seven children!"

And, even as she spoke,

terror struck with an invisible arrow the seven sisters

of the dead brothers stooped by the seven biers,

loose hair over their shoulders, mourning,

When six of them lay dead,

Niobe grabbed the seventh and covered her with her limbs and body,

and tried to protect in swathes of her robes, crying...

"Leave me the smallest of all my children, let me keep this one!"

But slender arrow

had already located the child she tried to hide and pray for.

Niobe gazed at the corpses - all her children were dead.

Her face hardened and whitened and as the blood left it.

Her very hair hardened like hair carved by a chisel.

Life drained from every part of it.

Her tongue solidified in her stone mouth.

Her feet could not move.

Her hands could not move, they were stone.

All stone, packed in stone

and, yet, this stone woman wept.

A hurricane caught her up

and carried her into Phrygia, her homeland, and set her down

on top of a mountain and, there, a monument to herself,

Niobe still weeps.

As the weather wears at her...

In the story, she's not exactly the most sympathetic character, is she?

No, she's not. And Niobe's crime is that she's proud.

And she boasts, quite willingly, at her pride,

and thus angers the goddess.

She has 14 children, seven of each,

and she's extremely proud of them,

and she rather lamentably says,

"I'm so fortunate,

"I have so much that fate could never touch me.

"Even if fate took from me most of my children,

"I could never be only left with two.

"Two is a pathetic amount of children to have,

"like Leto."

And Leto just happens to have rather good kids.

And Leto's two children are Apollo...

Apollo and Artemis, isn't it?

Yeah. And, so...

It's the wrong call to make, really.

-She's the tiger mum from hell.

-She is.

And, as a consequence, her 14 children are...

..executed by Apollo and her grief is such...

..that she then metamorphoses into a mountain,

and yet her grief is such that even the mountain weeps.

It kind of goes beyond 3D. It's sort of...

There's a sort of depth to it,

It's almost, all of a sudden,

you see Niobe kind of coming up and being there

and the history of that story's alive to you as an audience.

No tale of Ovid's has permeated modern culture

more than Echo and Narcissus,

which reverberates throughout Twelfth Night and Romeo And Juliet,

and has given us the term "narcissism".

Here, Fiona Shaw delivers Ted Hughes' version

of this devastating story of the unrequited love of a nymph

for a beautiful young man.

In his 16th year,

Narcissus,

still a slender boy,

but already a man, infatuated many.

His beauty had flowered.

A pride kept all his admirers at a distance.

None dared be familiar...

let alone touch him.

A day came out on the mountains,

Narcissus was driving and netting and killing the deer!

When Echo saw him.

Echo...

..who cannot be silent when another speaks.

Echo, who cannot speak at all unless another has spoken.

The moment Echo saw Narcissus,

she was in love.

She followed him, like a starving wolf following a stag

too strong to be tackled,

and like a cat in winter, at a fire,

she could not edge close enough to what singed her and would burn her.

She almost...

..to call out to him...

And, somehow, let him know how she felt.

..for some other to speak.

So she could snatch their last words

with whatever sense they might lend her.

It so happened Narcissus had strayed apart from his companions.

He hello'd them.

"Where are you? I'm here!"

And Echo caught at the syllables

as if they were precious.

"I'm here!

And, "I'm here!" And, "I'm here!"

Narcissus looked around wildly.

"I'll stay here," he shouted.

"You..."

And, "Come to me!" shouted Echo.

"Come to me!

"To me!

"To me! To me!"

Narcissus stood, baffled...

..whether to stay or go.

He began to run, calling as he ran.

"Stay there!"

But Echo cried back, weeping to utter it,

"Stay there! Stay there! Stay there!"

Narcissus stopped...

..and listened.

Then more quietly...

"Let's meet halfway.

"Come!"

And Echo eagerly repeated it.

"Come."

But when she emerged from the undergrowth,

her expression pleading,

her arms raised to embrace him,

Narcissus turned and ran.

"No!" he cried, "No! I would sooner be dead than let you touch me!"

Echo collapsed in sobs.

Her voice lurched among the mountains.

"Touch me. Touch me...

"Touch me...

"Touch me..."

I had a poster of Narcissus and Echo in my bedroom,

one of those Pre-Raphaelite posters,

and I recently saw it again, I thought,

"My God, that must have been in my mind since I was a teenager."

I think Ovid is doing what all great writers do.

I don't think there's anyone who hasn't got Narcissus in him or her.

And there's probably no-one who hasn't got Echo in him or her.

It's about the capacity of the human mind either be...

..full of self-love or...

..or to chase somebody who's out of reach.

So, they are both fantastic aspects of the human consciousness.

I was interested in it because I thought it was about reply.

That it's very good.

Yeats does a lot of poems where there's somebody speaking

to somebody else and somebody in reply.

And, in that way, it goes back earlier than the Romans

to the Greeks, really,

that somehow truth lies somewhere between the two people responding.

They're not goodies and baddies, everyone is merely a point of view.

Perhaps the greatest set piece of the Metamorphoses

is the tale of Phaethon

who longs to drive the chariot of his father, the sun god, Phoebus,

as it plots its course across the sky.

As our group tells the story here,

despite Phaethon's father begging him not to go,

the impetuous sun sets out

only to create a cataclysm of global proportions.

Phaethon's tragic story haunts the imagination

of Shakespeare's King Richard II and the 14-year-old Juliet.

When Phaethon bragged about his father, Phoebus, the sun god,

his friends mocked him.

"Your mother must be crazy or you're crazy to believe her.

"How could the sun be anyone's father?

ALL GIGGLE

In a rage of humiliation, Phaethon came to his mother, Clymene.

"They're all laughing at me, and I can't answer.

"What can I say? It's horrible.

"I have to stand like a dumb fool and be laughed at.

"If it's true, Mother," he cried, "if the sun,

"the high god, Phoebus, if he is my father, give me proof,

"give me evidence that I belong to Heaven."

Then he embraced her.

Either moved by her child's distress

or piqued to defend her honour

against the old rumour, Clymene responded.

She stretched out arms to the sun.

"I swear, you are his child.

"You are the son of that great star

"which lights up the whole world.

"If I lie, then I pray to go blind this moment

"and never again to see the light of day."

Phaethon rushed out.

His head ablaze with the idea of Heaven.

He crossed his own land and came to his father's Dawn Palace.

He went straight into the royal presence

but had to stand back.

For there was the god.

Phoebus, the sun,

robed in purple and sitting on a throne of emeralds that blazed,

splitting and refracting his flames.

The boy stared, dumbfounded,

dazed by the marvel of it all.

Then the great god turned on him the gaze that misses nothing and spoke.

"Phaethon, my son.

"Or rather, a man a father might be proud of.

"Why are you here?

"You must have come with a purpose.

"What is it?"

Phaethon replied,

"Oh, god! Oh, light of creation!

"Oh, Phoebus, my father,

"if I may call you my father?

"If Clymene is not protecting herself from some shame

"by claiming your name for me, give me the solid proof?

"Let it be known to the whole world that I am your son.

"Remove all doubt."

His father doffed his crown of blinding light and,

beckoning Phaethon closer, embraced him.

"Do not fear to call me father.

"Your mother told you the truth.

"To free yourself from doubt ask me for something.

"I promise, you shall have it.

"And though I've never seen the lake in Hell

"by which we gods in Heaven make our oaths unviable,

"I call on that lake now to witness this oath of mine."

Phoebus had barely finished before Phaethon

asked for the chariot of the sun

and one whole day driving the winged horses.

His father recoiled.

He almost cursed his own oath.

His head shook as if it were trying to break its promise.

"Your foolish words," he said, "show me the tragic folly of mine.

"If promises could be broken, I would break this.

"I would deny you nothing except this.

"No mortal could hope to manage those reins.

"Not even the gods are allowed to touch them!

"Only see how foolish you are.

"The most conceited of the gods

"knows better than to think he could survive

"one day riding the burning axle-tree.

"Even for me it's not easy.

"Once they're fired up with the terrible burners

"that they stoke in their deep chests

"and belch flames from their mouths and nostrils...

"Once their blood is up, they will hardly obey me.

"And they know me.

"Think again.

"You ask me for solid proof you are my son?

"My fears for your life are proof solid enough. Look at me.

"If only your eyes could see through to my heart

"and see it sick with a father's distress.

"Choose anything else in Creation, it's yours.

"But this one thing you've chosen I dare not grant it.

"Choose again, Phaethon."

Phaethon seemed not to have heard.

He wanted nothing but to drive the chariot

and horses of the sun!

His father could find no other means to delay him.

He led him out to the chariot.

And, as Phaethon stood there, light-headed with confidence,

giddy with admiration of the miraculous workmanship and detail...

When the sun god saw that,

and the reddening sky and the waning moon seeming to fall,

he called the Hours to yoke the horses.

But, now, as Phoebus anointed Phaethon with a medicinal blocker

to protect him from the burning

and fixed the crown of rays on the boy's head,

he saw the tragedy to come and sighed.

"At least...

"First, use the whip not at all or lightly.

"But rein the team hard, it's not easy.

"Their whole inclination is to be gone.

"Second, avoid careering over the whole five zones of Heaven.

"Keep to the broad highway that curves within the three zones,

"temperate and tropic.

"Now, Fortune go with you

"and I pray she will take better care of you

"than you have taken care of yourself."

But Phaethon...

..ignored the grieving god and leapt aboard,

and catching the reins from his father's hands joyfully thanked him.

Pyrois, Eous, Aethon, Phlegon,

the four winged horses stormed to be off.

They burst upwards, they hurled themselves ahead of themselves.

Winged hooves churning cloud,

they outstripped those dawn winds from the east.

But from the first moment, they felt something wrong with the chariot.

The load was too light,

more like a light pinnace,

without ballast or cargo,

without the deep-kneeled weight to hold a course...

Sliding away sidelong at every gust.

The chariot bounced and was whisked about as if it was empty.

When the horses felt this, they panicked.

They swerved off the highway and plunged into trackless Heaven.

Their driver, rigid with fear, gripped the chariot rail.

It was true, he had...

And even if he could have controlled the wild heads of the horses,

he did not know the route.

For the first time, the stars of the plough smoked.

And though the Arctic Ocean was forbidden to them,

they strained to quench themselves in it.

And now Phaethon looked down from the zenith and...

..his whole body seemed suddenly bloodless, his knees wobbled,

his eyes dazzled and darkened,

he wished he'd never seen his father's horses.

He wished he'd never learned who his father was.

He wished his father had broken his promise.

Meanwhile, the chariot bounded along like a ship under a gale.

What could he do? Much of the sky was behind him,

but always more ahead.

Then, the horses took off blindly,

uncontrolled they let their madness fling them

this way and that over the sky.

They dashed in among the stars,

switching the chariot along like a whiptail.

They swept low till the clouds boiled in their wake

and the Moon was astonished to see her brother's chariot below her.

Earth began to burn.

The summits first. Baked, the cracks gaped,

all fields, all thickets,

all crops were instant fuel...

In the one flare, noble cities were rendered

to black stumps of burnt stone.

Whole nations, in all their variety,

were clouds of hot ashes blowing in the wind.

Now, Phaethon saw the whole world mapped with fire.

He looked through flames and he breathed flames.

Flame in and flame out, like a fire-eater,

as the chariot sparked white-hot,

he cowered from the showering cinders.

His eyes streamed in the fire smoke and,

in the boiling darkness,

he no longer knew where he was or where he was going.

He hung on as he could and left everything to the horses.

The earth cracked open

and the unnatural light beamed down into Hell,

scaring the king and queen of that kingdom

with their own terrific shadows.

The Almighty, aroused, called on the gods,

including Phoebus who had lent the chariot.

He asked them to witness that Heaven and Earth

could be saved only by what he now must do.

He soared to the top of Heaven,

into the cockpit of thunder.

From here, he would pour the clouds and roll the thunders,

and hurl bolts.

But now he was cloudless.

There was not a drop of rain in all Heaven.

With a splitting crack of thunder,

he lifted a bolt, poised it by his ear,

then drove the barbed flash,

point blank, into Phaethon.

The explosion snuffed the ball of flame

as it blew the chariot to fragments.

Phaethon went spinning out of his life.

The crazed horses scattered.

They tore free with scraps of the yoke, trailing their broken reins.

Shattered wheels gyrating far apart,

shards of the car, the stripped axle,

bits of the harness, all in slow motion,

sprinkle through emptiness.

Phaethon, hair ablaze,

a fiery speck lengthening a vapour trail,

plunged towards the earth

like a star falling and burning out on a clear night.

His father mourned, hidden, eclipsed with sorrow.

The directness and immediacy of the stories, and particularly,

if you hear someone reading it to you, it's like Jackanory on acid.

In all of them, it feels that whatever crime the person

may have committed, it's just the lesson they have to learn.

You know, if Phaethon had been taught by his dad

not to borrow the car keys for the weekend, you know,

it's quite extreme for the universe to blow up around him.

It's certainly... He won't be asking to borrow the car keys again,

-I don't think.

-There's a lovely quote that...

..Ted Hughes himself said

about why Shakespeare and Ovid have parallels.

He said that both of them were interested in passion,

or rather in what a passion feels like to one possessed by it.

Not just ordinary passion, but human passion in extremis -

passion where it combusts, or levitates,

or mutates into an experience of the supernatural.

Perhaps that's why... That's why we still read

and we still NEED Ovid,

and we still need Shakespeare.