The Routledge Research Companion to Shakespeare and Classical Literature

Sean Keilen, Nick Moschovakis, Sean Keilen, Nick Moschovakis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317041672
• Subtopic: Shakespeare Drama
• Index: Literature

In this wide-ranging and ambitiously conceived Research Companion, contributors explore Shakespeare's relationship to the classic in two broad senses. The essays analyze Shakespeare's specific debts to classical works and weigh his classicism's likeness and unlikeness to that of others in his time; they also evaluate the effects of that classical influence to assess the extent to which it is connected with whatever qualities still make Shakespeare, himself, a classic (arguably the classic) of modern world literature and drama. The first sense of the classic which the volume addresses is the classical culture of Latin and Greek reading, translation, and imitation. Education in the canon of pagan classics bound Shakespeare together with other writers in what was the dominant tradition of English and European poetry and drama, up through the nineteenth and even well into the twentieth century. Second—and no less central—is the idea of classics as such, that of books whose perceived value, exceeding that of most in their era, justifies their protection against historical and cultural change. The volume's organizing insight is that as Shakespeare was made a classic in this second, antiquarian sense, his work's reception has more and more come to resemble that of classics in the first sense—of ancient texts subject to labored critical study by masses of professional interpreters who are needed to mediate their meaning, simply because of the texts' growing remoteness from ordinary life, language, and consciousness. The volume presents overviews and argumentative essays about the presence of Latin and Greek literature in Shakespeare's writing. They coexist in the volume with thought pieces on the uses of the classical as a historical and pedagogical category, and with practical essays on the place of ancient classics in today's Shakespearean classrooms.

1
Shakespeare’s Books

Michael Ursell and Melissa Yinger

Michel de Montaigne, bibliophile, skeptic, and classicist, described his reading habits in the essay “Of Books” thus: “I do not search and toss over books but for an honester recreation to please, and pastime to delight my self: or if I study, I only endeavor to find out the knowledge that teacheth … me how to die well and how to live well.”¹ Montaigne’s seemingly relaxed approach to his studies has something in common with the way Shakespeare is imagined to have made use of classical books: like Montaigne, Shakespeare’s reading of the classics often seems idiosyncratic and informal, balancing pleasure and instruction, but with the scales tipped slightly in favor of the former. Unlike Montaigne, however, Shakespeare almost certainly did not write at a desk in a personal library encircled by over 1,000 books, glancing occasionally at sententiae carved and painted onto the beams. Partly because no material traces of Shakespeare’s library remain, it was once common for readers to imagine him writing without recourse to any books at all.²

What can be said about Shakespeare’s library? He made no mention of books in his will.³ We know far more about the libraries of his contemporaries, John Donne and Ben Jonson. Donne’s books, of which 213 have been identified, are somewhat characteristic of an early modern library, the majority treating theology (Keynes). Of Jonson’s library around 225 books have been found, representing an atypical collection that privileged the classics, poetry, and poetics (McPherson). In Shakespeare’s era, an impressive library would have comprised 400–600 books, with truly rare collections, like the Sidney library at Penshurst, containing at least around 4,500 volumes.⁴ These numbers give researchers some useful parameters for speculating on the size and shape of Shakespeare’s library, but not on its specific contents.

In this chapter, we examine three works that have been the subject of intensive and revealing source studies. The first is Titus Andronicus, a play that clearly reflects Shakespeare’s extensive and early reading in the classics. The second is The Rape of Lucrece, a poem that exposes the challenges of working with classical books, even while suggesting that the lessons of classicism are so clear they need not be read. Finally, the later play Troilus and Cressida shows the role of printers—from the earliest English ones to those of Shakespeare’s era—in shaping classicism. In all three texts, Shakespeare used certain books of Latin and Greek literature within a framework that we could coherently call “classicism,” even if his classicism is not ours.

Grammar school books

“What is the end of study?”

(LLL 1.1.55)

In his foundational survey of sixteenth-century translations of the classics into English, Henry Burrowes Lathrop relates Tudor classicism to the humanism of the great Renaissance scholar, textual editor, and writer Desiderius Erasmus. What Lathrop calls the “organic unity” of the Erasmian project (32) relied on continental Europe for new editions of the classics, including Aldus Manutius’s beautifully printed books. Among the Aldine editions was the Adagia, or Adages—an extensive commentary on famous sayings, prepared by Erasmus and first published in 1500— which Thomas Greene calls “a vast, baggy, shapeless hulk of a book” (1).

The Adagia gave readers access to a copious collection of sources, but it did so in a way that supported indirect, fragmented transmission. If an English writer drew on a line from Horace, it might have come from the Adagia or even a translation of it, such as Richard Taverner’s from 1539, rather than from one of the sixteenth-century Horace editions printed in London (Gillespie 158). Thus, sixteenth-century classicism evolved alongside new markets for printed books. And these books allowed for unexpected uses that broke away from any single, monolithic project of classicism. (Although Lathrop turns to printed books to affirm classicism’s coherence across early modern translation projects, such evidence excludes the networks of manuscript publication and circulation through which English writers worked with Latin and Greek literature, via commonplace books, manuscript copies, and personal annotated editions. The Erasmian ideal of copia or abundance of rhetorical expression, in practice, led to a proliferation of heterogeneous book objects.)

Although England lacked a printer like Manutius to shape Erasmian classicism into a collection of books with similar designs, the kingdom did have one standardized Latin textbook, mandated by Henry VIII and known as “Lily’s Grammar.” First printed in 1533, with an educational philosophy derived primarily from Erasmus’s De ratione studii, this practical book continued to be reprinted every few years throughout the sixteenth century—sometimes in English and Latin, sometimes entirely in Latin. Like the Adagia, “Lily’s Grammar” gave students like Shakespeare short, disassembled pieces of Vergil and Ovid while they learned figures of speech and Latin prosody. One famous line, from the Aeneid, illustrated the caesura, or pause, in a metrical verse line (“Omnia vincit amor et nos cedamus amori” [G6^v]). Another, from Ovid, illustrated elegiac meter (“Res est solliciti plena timoris amor” [G7]). When Shakespeare attended grammar school, the books designed to shape him into a classicist according to a program—and some of the first books he is likely to have studied formally—introduced Latin literature according to a clear structure, but one that left open the possibility of reassembling the fragments into new forms.

Love’s Labor’s Lost, a play with no direct classical source but one which is generally seen to satirically represent book-learning, depicts a child mocking characters who have become “learnèd fool[s]” (5.2.72) despite their training in Latin and the classics: “They have been at a great feast / of languages and stolen the scraps” (5.1.35–36). Although meant as an insult, the line suggests how the classics could circulate in “scraps”—pieces of Latin scattered in grammar books and commonplace books—and be redeployed as such. Love’s Labor’s Lost describes the culture of bookishness that Shakespeare inhabited, which could strip classicism of any sense of stable coherence. Nathaniel, in an attempt to excuse Dull’s ignorance to Holofernes, imagines working with books as a kind of nutrition: “Sir, he hath never fed of the dainties that are bred in a book. He hath not eat paper, as it were; he hath not drunk ink: his intellect is not replenished” (4.2.24–26).

Books like “Lily’s Grammar” were meant to be fully digested: the student would learn to read, write, and speak the classics so effectively that he would soon no longer need the book. Lily’s note to the reader explains, “These preceptes well kept will bring a man clean past the use of this Grammar booke & make him as ready as his boke” (xviii). That Tudor pedagogy encouraged students to move “clean past” their books may explain why scholars struggle to untangle Shakespeare’s classical references.⁵ One characteristic of the advanced student, according to the translators of an Erasmian publication dated 1545, was his ability to “carry his leson in mynde” (Baldwin 1944: 98). Advanced students were encouraged to “make somewhat alone, without example” (Kempe 223), which effectively trained them to detach themselves from books as material objects. In trying to point directly to the books that Shakespeare used, therefore, we may be seeking a connection that Shakespeare intentionally severed.

Titus’s biblio-copia

Placed side by side, the early play Titus Andronicus and the late play The Tempest can illustrate the grammar school trajectory, which begins with a close attachment to one’s books and ends by leaving them behind. When Prospero casts his book away (5.1.57), this is perhaps because it has distracted him from his responsibilities and from Milan, or perhaps because he has advanced beyond his need of it. Yet Shakespeare’s books seem closer than ever in this speech, which is his most extended quotation from a classical text, deriving from Medea’s speech in Book 7 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Kenneth Muir observes that it makes use of both Ovid’s Latin and Golding’s English, at times correcting Golding. Even “thirty years after he left school,” Muir explains, “Shakespeare remembered enough Latin to improve on the accuracy of Golding’s translation” (3). The moment demonstrates the long after-effects of grammar school book use, hinting at a conflicted drive to hold on to classical books and at the same time to let go of books.

Titus Andronicus, written at the beginning of Shakespeare’s career, contains the greatest number of “definite and detailed” classical references (Root 15).⁶ The play’s allusions invoke and cite classical texts in ways that the later plays generally do not, giving the impression that Shakespeare “had his Ovid or Vergil open before him as he wrote” (15); others were probably open before him as well. Shakespeare’s early classicism in Titus Andronicus provides a reference point for the books that would be most influential over the course of his career: Ovid, Seneca, Vergil, and, intertwined with these, Homer, Horace, Herodotus, Plutarch, and Livy.

The play’s use of Seneca exemplifies Shakespeare’s movement among multiple editions and translations from the classics. Titus’s outcry against Lavinia’s violation and mutilation borrows from the Phaedra (671–72), while also drawing on Seneca’s Epistle 107. Titus’s Latin—“Magni dominator poli, / Tam lentus audis scelera? tam lentos vides”—conflates the Phaedra’s “Magne regnator deum, / tam lentus audis scelera? tam lentus vides” with the epistle’s “parens celsique dominator poli” (Bullough 27). Since a grammar school-educated reader of Latin was encouraged to take leave of his books, it is difficult to decide whether Shakespeare misremembered or intentionally transformed quotations he had read in grammar school or afterwards.

Shakespeare’s frequent use of these multiple “Senecas” in Titus Andronicus and beyond suggests the use of a variety of sources. While his conflation of lines from the Phaedra and Epistle 107 attests to his awareness of Seneca in Latin volumes, he would have also read Seneca’s tragedies in the English quarto Seneca: His Tenne Tragedies, printed by Thomas Newton in 1581.⁷ This book brought together the English translations of various Senecan tragedies, most of which had already been printed in the 1560s. To these extant translations—Jasper Heywood’s Hercules Furens, Thyestes, and Troas; Alexander Nevile’s Oedipus; John Studley’s Hippolytus, Medea, Agamemnon, and Hercules Oetaeus; and Thomas Nuce’s Octavia— Newton added his own version of Thebais.⁸ Shakespeare’s Seneca, therefore, underscores a difference between twenty-first- and sixteenth-century classicism: while modern scholarship strives for complete, authoritative editions of texts by single authors, Shakespeare accessed his classics in various states of completion, and in collections that brought together the work of multiple editors and translators in a single book.

Many of the other sources refe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Shakespeare’s books
• 2 A classical education
• 3 Shakespeare and English translations of the classics
• 4 Genre: comedy and tragedy
• 5 The sonnets and narrative poems: Shakespeare, Ovid, reversal, and surprise
• 6 Shakespeare’s grammar: Latin, literacy, and the vernacular
• 7 Rhetoric and dialectic
• 8 History and geography
• 9 Shakespeare and myth
• 10 Shakespeare and classical cosmology
• 11 Politics
• 12 Classical drama before Shakespeare: from imitatio to “mimic men”
• 13 Classicism on the English stage during Shakespeare’s youth and maturity: popularizing classical learning
• 14 Popular classical drama: the case of Heywood’s Ages
• 15 Theater in theory: Shakespeare, sacrifice, and classical antiquity
• 16 Later classicism in the drama: how Shakespeare’s ghosts came to haunt the eighteenth century
• 17 Shakespeare and Asian classics: encounters in India
• 18 Shakespeare and “the classics” in the classroom: ten resources
• 19 Human value: ethics, antiquity, misanthropy
• 20 What is a classic? Is Shakespeare a classic?
• Index