Metamorphoseon libri (Metamorphoses)

Chaucer's House of Fame takes its central apparatus from Ovid: the dwelling of Fame in Book XII of the Metamorphoses, built where earth, sea and sky meet, open on every side, where every word ever spoken arrives and is passed on distorted. Chaucer keeps the building, the noise, the crowding and the unreliability of what comes out of it, and adds a dreamer carried there by an eagle who lectures him about acoustics on the way. Ovid is named in the poem, and the eagle's tour of the temple of Venus in Book I is a summary of the Aeneid told through the same habit of reading classical narrative as a catalogue of transformations. The Metamorphoses was the single most-read classical text of the medieval schoolroom, which is the ordinary route by which it reached him.

Chaucer's poem opens with a sleepless narrator reading a book to pass the night, and the book he reads is Ovid: the story of Ceyx and Alcyone from Metamorphoses XI, of a drowned king whose wife is told of his death by a vision sent from the house of sleep. Chaucer summarises it at length and then uses it as the machinery of his own poem. The house of sleep supplies his dream, and the pattern of a survivor who has to be brought to say aloud that the person is dead is what the whole encounter with the Black Knight then enacts. He names Ovid in the text. This is not an inferred debt but a quoted one.

The play within the play is Ovid. Pyramus and Thisbe, performed by the mechanicals in the last act, is a tale from the fourth book of the Metamorphoses, and Shakespeare plays it as farce. The frame is Ovidian too, and more deeply. Bottom is given an ass's head and is still himself inside it, which is the Metamorphoses' whole subject: a body changed by a power that is not interested in consent, and a mind left to cope. Elizabethan schoolboys read Ovid in Latin, and Shakespeare is quoting a text his audience knew.

Céline Sciamma's film reads Ovid inside the story. Héloïse, Marianne and Sophie read the story of Orpheus and Eurydice from the Metamorphoses aloud and argue about why Orpheus looked back, and the film's ending is built on that choice: the poet's choice rather than the lover's.

The plot arrives from Ovid's Pyramus and Thisbe by a traceable route: two lovers from neighbouring households forbidden to meet, a plan to escape by night, a misread sign, and a double suicide in which each dies believing the other already dead. Shakespeare's immediate source was Arthur Brooke's poem of 1562, which took the story from an Italian line of novellas that had been reworking the Ovidian tale for a century. He knew the original too, and staged it as the mechanicals' farce in A Midsummer Night's Dream at about the same time, which is a fair indication of how present it was to him.

Shaw's title names the sculptor of Metamorphoses X, who makes a statue of a woman, falls in love with it, and sees it brought to life by Venus. The play turns the story into phonetics and class: Higgins remakes Eliza Doolittle's speech and treats the result as his creation. MEDIUM because the debt is to the myth, which Ovid's is the classic telling of, rather than to anything particular in his text; Shaw's ending pointedly refuses the lovers' union the myth ends with.

Anaïs Mitchell's musical retells the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, with Hades and Persephone, in a Depression-era setting: Orpheus goes down to the underworld to bring Eurydice back, is allowed to lead her out on condition that he does not look back, and looks back. MEDIUM: the debt is to the myth, of which Metamorphoses X is one of the two classic Latin tellings (the other is Virgil's, in the Georgics), rather than to anything particular in Ovid's text.

Ovid's story of Pentheus in Metamorphoses III follows the plot of Euripides' play: the king of Thebes refuses to recognise Bacchus, imprisons one of the god's followers, goes to spy on the women's rites on Mount Cithaeron and is torn apart by them, his mother Agave first. Ovid adds material of his own, notably the story of the sailors turned into dolphins, told by the captured follower Acoetes. MEDIUM, as one episode among a lot of them.