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Reviewed by:
  • Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity by Colin Burrow
  • Nicholas Moschovakis (bio)
Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity. By Colin Burrow. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Illus. Pp. viii + 282. $84.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

When this volume appeared, it quickly sparked considerable—and disputatious—interest. Why? Its title is bland, almost Victorian. And this seeming conservatism [End Page 537] is borne out by the book's old-fashioned contents, its chapters focused on authors and genres. A framing introduction is followed by a chapter on Shakespeare's education, "Learning from the Past"; next are chapters on "Virgil" and "Ovid" (epic), "Roman Comedy" (Plautus and Terence), "Seneca" (tragedy), "Plutarch," and a conclusion. As these chapter titles suggest, Burrow's Shakespeare is an author among authors—not a discursive construction, "Shakespeare," to be decomposed into material and ideological elements. As a youth learning Latin (but likely no or minimal Greek), he parses, translates, and imitates ancient texts. He then returns to a few favorite ancient sources over a lifetime of reading. But, of course, it is this very literariness that has set Burrow at odds with some in the scholarly crowd. A classicist, Michael Silk, even took him to task in The Times Literary Supplement for reviving a retrograde mythology of authorship (setting off a minor fracas in the "Letters").

Such charges of reaction may not be quite without point—but they are onesided. For Burrow's Shakespeare, if not radical, does not embody "classically" conservative literary values. Socially at once representative and marginal, a grammar-school man writing among university graduates, he is sensitive to social distinctions in ways that leak through the confident structures of his art. Despite imperfect book learning, he tries to keep up in his own way, yet can resort to mockery of the educational attainments he lacks. Vulnerable, pragmatic, changeable—if anything, he is as much a Romantic as a "classic." To many readers, such sympathetic author-centered criticism feels refreshing. Burrow explores intertextuality through verbal allusions, thematic resonances, and plausible authorial intentions. The result joins philological insight to a generous, humane sensibility. At the same time, Burrow has done his homework: having read historicist scholarship on antiquity as a site and source of early modern political discourse, he often cites this scholarship and uses it, though few of his arguments hinge on it.

The first two chapters interrogate the well-worn themes suggested by Burrow's title. The term "antiquity" for Shakespeare has no single meaning, but a problematic double sense—a reverent name for a glorious "classical" past and a common noun denoting merely old, fusty things. The notion of the "classical," for its part, had only begun to form in Shakespeare's England and was still ill-formed at his death. So Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity is not so complacent a phrase, marking instead our modern distance from how Shakespeare regarded the ancient world. Most fundamentally, his educational trajectory rendered his "'knowledge' of the classics . . . situational," "inseparable from the ways he used it" (30). His allusions need not bring whole texts into play; commonplacing and the use of sententiae encouraged the circulation of classical fragments (24). No textual scholar, Shakespeare found dramatic potential in the vagaries of real-life literary talk, the impermanence of grammar-school lessons, and the branching paths of interpretation.

Burrow develops this image of Shakespeare apprehending the ancient past, never as a whole, but partially and—given his dramatic priorities—opportunistically: "Classical allusions . . . distinguish between different groups, and . . . position characters in relation to others. They also create opportunities for . . . characters talking just past each other," building "intimacy between the playwright and his [End Page 538] audience" and potentially detaching the "audience from the . . . character" (50). As this "multiplicity of perspectives tends to migrate upwards and outwards," the audience members "are presented with possible allusions to or transformations of classical texts, and are then given the task of working out . . . their theatrical and moral valence" (76). This contingency of Shakespeare's classicism upon his sources and dramatic aims explains why five of Burrow's chapters successively address individual authors and genres.

In singling out six ancient authors, Burrow courts slight controversy with respect to three: Virgil, Terence, and...

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