Book excerpt: In Ovid and the Cultural Politics of Early Modern England, Liz Oakley-Brown considers English versions of the Metamorphoses - a poem concerned with translation and transformation on a multiplicity of levels - as important sites of social and historical difference from the fifteenth to the early eighteenth centuries. Through the exploration of a range of canonical and marginal texts, from Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus to women's embroideries of Ovidian myths, Oakley-Brown argues that translation is central to the construction of national and gendered identities.