SHAKESPEARE AND THE CLASSICS

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 such crucial areas of human experience 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 the most rounded and comprehensive treatment of Shakespeare’s classicism currently available and will be a useful first port of call for students and others approaching the subject.

CHARLES MARTINDALE is Professor of Latin at the Department of Classics and Ancient History, University of Bristol. He is the author of John Milton and the Transformation of Ancient Epic (London and Sydney 1986), Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception (Cambridge 1993), Shakespeare and the Uses of Antiquity (with Michelle Martindale, London and New York 1990) and editor of Ovid Renewed: Ovidian Influences on Literature and Art from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century (Cambridge 1988) and The Cambridge Companion to Virgil (Cambridge 1997).

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 (Cambridge 2000) and has published in Shakespeare Survey, Notes and Queries, Connotations, English Language Notes, and Review of English Studies.

SHAKESPEARE AND THE CLASSICS

EDITED BY
CHARLES MARTINDALE AND A. B. TAYLOR

PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
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© Cambridge University Press 2004

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
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the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2004

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

Typeface Adobe Garamond 11/12.5 pt.   System LATEX 2_e   [TB]

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Shakespeare and the classics / edited by Charles Martindale & A. B. Taylor.
p.   cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 294) and index.
ISBN 0 521 82345 5 (hardback)
1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616 – Knowledge – Literature.   2. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616 – Knowledge – Greece.   3. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616 – Knowledge – Rome.   4. Classicism – England – History – 16th century.   5. Classical literature – Appreciation – England.   6. English literature – Classical influences.   I. Martindale, Charles.   II. Taylor, A. B. (Albert Booth)
PR3037.S56 2004 822.3′3 – dc22   2004040405

ISBN 0 521 82345 5 hardback

to
Jeannette, Mark, Chris, and Sue Taylor
to
Gabriel and Benjamin Martindale

Contents

Notes on contributors

GORDON BRADEN is Linden Kent Memorial Professor of English at the University of Virginia. He is author of The Classics and English Renaissance Poetry: Three Case Studies (New Haven 1978), Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition (New Haven 1985), Petrarchan Love and the Continental Renaissance (New Haven 2000), and, with William Kerrigan, The Idea of the Renaissance (Baltimore 1989).

SARAH ANNES BROWN is a Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge. She has written The Metamorphosis of Ovid: Chaucer to Ted Hughes (London 1999) and Devoted Sisters: Representations of the Sister Relationship in Nineteenth-Century British and American Literature (Burlington, VT 2003), and is co-editor (with Charles Martindale) of Rowe’s translation of Lucan’s Pharsalia (London 1997). She has published several articles on influence and allusion and is currently working on the creative reception of The Tempest.

COLIN BURROW is Reader in Renaissance and Comparative Literature at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College. He is the author of Epic Romance: Homer to Milton (Oxford 1993), Edmund Spenser (Plymouth 1996), and is the editor of Shakespeare’s Complete Sonnets and Poems (Oxford 2002).

STUART GILLESPIE is Reader in English Literature at Glasgow University. He is the editor of the journal Translation and Literature, author of Shakespeare’s Books: A Dictionary of Shakespeare Sources (London 2001), and joint general editor of the forthcoming Oxford History of Literary Translation in English.

DAVID HOPKINS is Professor of English Literature at the University of Bristol. He is the author of John Dryden (Cambridge 1986), John Dryden (Writers and their Work) (Plymouth 2003); with Charles Martindale, editor of Horace Made New (Cambridge 1993), and with Paul Hammond, editor of Dryden’s Poems (forthcoming). He has a particular interest in English / Classical literary relations, and is currently co-editing volume 3 (1660–1790) of the forthcoming Oxford History of Literary Translation in English.

HEATHER JAMES is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. Her publications include Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire (Cambridge 1997), and numerous essays on Shakespeare as well as George Sandys, John Milton, Baldassare Castiglione, and Marguerite de Navarre. Her current work focuses on Ovid’s influence on poetic form and political thought in the Renaissance. She is co-editor of the Norton Anthology of World Literature.

RAPHAEL LYNE is a Lecturer in the Cambridge University Faculty of English, and a Fellow of New Hall. He is the author of Ovid’s Changing Worlds: English Metamorphoses (Oxford 1998). He has a particular interest in classical traditions and has published articles on Shakespeare, Marlowe, Donne, Drayton and Golding.

CHARLES MARTINDALE, Professor of Latin at the University of Bristol, has a special interest in the reception of the classics in English poetry. He is author of Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception (Cambridge 1993); with Michelle Martindale, of Shakespeare and the Uses of Antiquity (London and New York 1990); and editor of Ovid Renewed (Cambridge 1988) and The Cambridge Companion to Virgil (Cambridge 1997). He is currently writing a book on Latin poetry and the Kantian tradition in aesthetics.

A. D. NUTTALL FBA is Professor of English, New College, Oxford; his works include A New Mimesis (London 1983), Why Does Tragedy Give Pleasure? (Oxford 1996), and The Alternative Trinity: Gnostic Heresy in Marlowe, Milton, and Blake (Oxford 1998). He is interested in relations between philosophy and literature and in links between classical and English literature.

YVES PEYRÉ is Professor of English at Université Paul Valéry (Montpellier) and general editor of Cahiers Elisabéthains. He is author of La voix des mythes dans la tragédie élisabéthaine (Paris 1996), and a contributor to Shakespeare in the Twentieth Century, ed. J. Levenson, J. Bate, and Dieter Mehl (Delaware 1999), and Shakespeare’s Ovid: The Metamorphoses in the Plays and Poems, ed. A. B. Taylor (Cambridge 2000).

WOLFGANG RIEHLE is Professor of English at the Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz and a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. His books include The Middle English Mystics (transl. B. Standring) (London and Boston 1981), Shakespeare, Plautus, and the Humanist Tradition (Woodbridge 1990), and in German, a biography of Geoffrey Chaucer (Reinbek 1994), a study of Shakespeare’s dramatic art in his trilogy King Henry Ⅵ (Heidelberg 1997), and a biography of Daniel Defoe (Reinbek 2002).

JOHN ROE is Senior Lecturer in English and Related Literature, University of York. He is editor of Shakespeare: The Poems (Cambridge 1992), and author of Shakespeare and Machiavelli (Woodbridge, Suffolk 2002).

ERICA SHEEN is Lecturer in English Literature and Film at the University of Sheffield. She has published on Shakespeare, David Lynch, and Hollywood cinema.

MICHAEL SILK is Professor of Greek Language and Literature at King’s College London; his works include Interaction in Poetic Imagery (Cambridge 1974), Nietzsche on Tragedy (with J. P. Stern, Cambridge 1981, rev. edn 1983), Homer: The Iliad (Cambridge 1987, 2nd edn 2003), Tragedy and the Tragic: Greek Theatre and Beyond (ed., Oxford 1996, rev. edn 1998), Aristophanes and the Definition of Comedy (Oxford 2000, rev. edn 2002).

A. B. TAYLOR, formerly Dean of Humanities at The Swansea Institute, edited Shakespeare’s Ovid: The Metamorphoses in the Plays and Poems (Cambridge 2000), and is currently working on The Wound of Love in a World of Shadows: A Study of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’.

VANDA ZAJKO is Lecturer in Classics at the University of Bristol. She has wide-ranging interests in the reception of classical literature, and contributed a chapter to The Cambridge Companion to Homer (2004).

Abbreviations