Shakespeare and the Classics (review)

As a former classics major, I jumped at the chance to review this collection. According to its editors, the sixteen contributors aimed to provide "anyone interested in Shakespeare and the classics . . . with sophisticated and novel treatments, while not taking previous knowledge for granted" (2–3). Editors Martindale and Taylor have assembled a range of perspectives to argue that the writings (or translations) of Ovid, Virgil, Seneca, Plautus, Terence, and Plutarch are "of central importance in Shakespeare's works and in the structure of his imagination" (2). They encouraged their contributors to concentrate "on individual classical authors and the ways the great poet and dramatist knew and made use of them" (2). As we might expect, the bardolatry here sometimes threatens to get in the way of otherwise cogent analyses of what a writer familiar with "the classics" could do with them. Thankfully, almost all of the contributors have eschewed providing essay-length source identifications.

Part 1, "An Initial Perspective," begins with Colin Burrow's essay "Shakespeare and humanistic culture" which argues that the failings of Shakespeare's education in the Stratford Guildhall were largely what made his later readings, misreadings, and misrememberings so powerful. The Erasmian and Aschamite methods used at this time (double translation, arguing on either side of the question, the laborious creation of commonplace books that regularly divorced sententiae from purported authors) all contributed to Shakespeare's "mobilising a language of humanism. . . . A large part of the creativity of Shakespeare lies in his willingness to overlayer one shard of 'the classics' with another" (24). Fortunately, Shakespeare's education allowed him to appropriate the classics without a sense of reverence.

Following this magisterial introduction, the collection is divided into three sections. The first two have as their organizing principle Jonson's famous panegyric slap. "'Small Latine'" contains eight chapters on the major Latin authors whom Shakespeare drew upon: three chapters on Ovid, one on Virgil, one each on Plautus and Terence, and two on Seneca. In what is probably the strongest cluster, two of the three chapters concerning Ovid focus on single plays. Vanda Zajko ably explains how, in Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare's "fascination [with] change resides not in the shape-shifting of bodies but in its internal, psychological aspect" (42). A. B. Taylor next argues how Shakespeare, in his most Ovidian play, A Midsummer Night's Dream, warily negotiates a heavy reliance on Arthur Golding's Calvinist and moralizing translation of Metamorphoses (1567) while producing a play shot through with eroticism, inconstancy, and only partially recuperated insubordination. In the third chapter, Heather James deftly identifies how Shakespeare's learned heroines imitate and appropriate "the expressive liberties and audacious wit of Ovid" (79). After briefly sketching Marlowe's brilliant but troubled connection with Ovid, James proposes that Shakespeare took notes on how not to produce overly audacious tragic protagonists (81).

In the sole chapter on Virgil, Charles Martindale draws on the foundational source sleuthing done by Robert Kilburn Root over a century ago to remind us that Shakespeare's engagement with the Aeneid is limited to "the tragedy of Dido, the sack of Troy, and Aeneas' visit to the Underworld" (89). Accordingly, Martindale does not claim Shakespeare as a Virgilian poet. That is, not only did Virgil not produce a "profound modification of [Shakespeare's] sensibility and imagination," but "Shakespeare did not substantially influence the way that Virgil's poems were subsequently read and thus our sense of the kind of poet that Virgil is" (90). Martindale does admit, however, that recent works by Heather James and Margaret Tudeau-Clayton (and an early essay by Robert S. Miola, in a "less plausible, though sometimes suggestive" way) have re-emphasized the Virgil-Shakespeare nexus (103n).

Following Wolfgang Riehle's mini-chapter that devotes almost as much space to Plautine influences on Nicholas Udall's Ralph Roister Doister as to The Comedy of Errors, Raphael Lyne discusses the New Comedy time and space schemes that Shakespeare employs in The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth...