Shakespeare and Greece

Alison Findlay, Vassiliki Markidou

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781350079960
• eBook ISBN: 9781474244275
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Shakespeare Drama
• Index: Literature

This book seeks to invert Ben Jonson's claim that Shakespeare had 'small Latin and less Greek' and to prove that, in fact, there is more Greek and less Latin in a significant group of Shakespeare's texts: a group whose generic hybridity (tragic-comical-historical-romance) exemplifies the hybridity of Greece in the early modern imagination. To early modern England, Greece was an enigma. It was the origin and idealised pinnacle of Western philosophy, tragedy, democracy, heroic human endeavour and, at the same time, an example of decadence: a fallen state, currently under Ottoman control, and therefore an exotic, dangerous, 'Other' in the most disturbing senses of the word. Indeed, while Britain was struggling to establish itself as a nation state and an imperial authority by emulating classical Greek models, this ambition was radically unsettled by early modern Greece's subjection to the Ottoman Empire, which rendered Europe's eastern borders dramatically vulnerable. Focusing, for the first time, on Shakespeare's 'Greek' texts ( Venus and Adonis, The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Love's Labour's Lost, Troilus and Cressida, Timon of Athens, King Lear, Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen ), the volume considers how Shakespeare's use of antiquity and Greek myth intersects with early modern perceptions of the country and its empire.

Table of contents

• FC
• Half title
• Related titles
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Alison Findlay and Vassiliki Markidou
• 1 The Comedy of Errors and ‘farthest Greece’ Kent Cartwright
• 2 Embodying Greece in Elizabethan England: A Rhizomatic Review of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis and Love’s Labour’s Lost Liz Oakley-Brown
• 3 Greece ‘digested in a play’: Consuming Greek Heroism in The School of Abuse and Troilus and Cressida Efterpi Mitsi
• 4 ‘All’s with me meet that I can fashion fit’: Physis and Nomos in King Lear Nic Panagopoulos
• 5 Hospitality, Friendship and Republicanism in Timon of Athens John Drakakis
• 6 ‘To take our imagination / From bourn to bourn, region to region’: The Politics of GreekTopographies in Pericles, Prince of Tyre Vassiliki Markidou
• 7 Reshaping Athens in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Two Noble Kinsmen Alison Findlay
• 8 A Midsummer’s Night Dream in Modern Athens Mara Yanni
• Select Bibliography
• Index