Shakespeare and the Classics

This book demonstrates that the classics are of central importance in Shakespeare's plays and in the structure of his imagination.

Shakespeare and the Classics demonstrates that the classics are of central importance in Shakespeare's plays and in the structure of his imagination. Written by an international team of Shakespeareans and classicists, this book investigates Shakespeare's classicism and shows how he used a variety of classical books to explore crucial areas of human experience such as love, politics, ethics and history. The book focuses on Shakespeare's favourite classical authors, especially Ovid, Virgil, Seneca, Plautus and Terence, and, in translation only, Plutarch. Attention is also paid to the humanist background and to Shakespeare's knowledge of Greek literature and culture. The final section, from the perspective of reception, examines how Shakespeare's classicism was seen and used by later writers. This accessible book offers a rounded and comprehensive treatment of Shakespeare's classicism and will be a useful first port of call for students and others approaching the subject.

Introduction; Part I. An Initial Perspective: 1. Shakespeare and humanistic culture Colin Burrow; Part II. 'Small Latine': 2. 'Petruchio is 'Kated'': The Taming of the Shrew and Ovid Vanda Zajko; 3. Ovid's myths and the unsmooth course of love in A Midsummer Night's Dream A. B. Taylor; 4. Shakespeare's learned heroines in Ovid's schoolroom Heather James; 5. Shakespeare and Virgil Charles Martindale; 6. Shakespeare's reception of Plautus reconsidered Wolfgang Riehle; 7. Shakespeare, Plautus, and the discovery of new comic space Raphael Lyne; 8. 'Confusion now hath made his masterpiece': Senecan resonances in Macbeth Yves Peyre; 9. 'These are the only men': Seneca and monopoly in Hamlet 2.2 Erica Sheen; Part III. 'Lesse Greeke': 10. 'Character' in Plutarch and Shakespeare: Brutus, Julius Caesar, and Mark Antony John Roe; 11. Plutarch, Shakespeare, and the alpha males Gordon Braden; 12. Action at a distance: Shakespeare and the Greeks A. D. Nuttall; 13. Shakespeare and Greek romance: 'Like an old tale still' Stuart Gillespie; 14. Shakespeare and Greek tragedy: strange relationship Michael Silk; Part IV. The Reception of Shakespeare's Classicism: 15. 'The English Homer': Shakespeare, Longinus, and English 'Neoclassicism' David Hopkins; 16. 'There is no end but addition': the later reception of Shakespeare's classicism Sarah Brown.

This book demonstrates that the classics are of central importance in Shakespeare's plays and in the structure of his imagination. It investigates Shakespeare's classicism and shows how he used a variety of classical books to explore crucial areas of human experience such as love, politics, ethics and history.

Charles Martindale is Professor of Latin in the Department of Classics and Ancient History and Dean of the Faculty of Arts, University of Bristol. His most recent publications include The Cambridge Companion to Virgil (1997), Classics and the Uses of Reception (2006, edited with Richard Thomas) and Latin Poetry and the Judgement of Taste: An Essay in Aesthetics (2005).
A. B. Taylor is Retired Dean of Faculty (Humanities), The Swansea Institute. He is the editor of Shakespeare's Ovid: The Metamorphoses in the Plays and Poems (2000) and has published in Shakespeare Survey, Notes and Queries, Connotations, English Language Notes and the Review of English Studies.