Abstract
Shakespeare’s use of his classical sources, and his relationships to classical authors, have attracted a great deal of critical attention in recent years, with a wealth of scholarship focusing variously on his use of Ovid, Seneca, Plutarch and Greek tragedians. In their introduction to this substantial and wide-ranging volume, Sean Keilen and Nick Moschovakis explain that theirs is a rather different perspective, and that this study is concerned not only with Shakespeare’s use of the ancient classics (as the title might suggest) but also with the extent to which Shakespeare is himself a classic, ‘an artwork valued among the best of its era’ (1). The volume consciously combines these interrelated senses of the ‘classic’, asking ‘how important is this ancient inheritance to whatever qualities still make Shakespeare…arguably the “classic” of modern world literature and drama?’ and, more generally, ‘Can the ancient classics help us to make sense of Shakespeare as a classic of the present?’ (2). To this end, the volume comprises 20 contributions, split across four sections, and made up of traditional interpretive analyses and arguments, and what the editors term ‘thought-pieces on the use of “the classical” as a historical and pedagogical category’ (2), as well as an enlivening series of short pieces on how Shakespeare and the classics might be taught in the modern classroom.
Chapter 1, by Michael Ursell and Melissa Yinger, traces the books Shakespeare was likely to have known, and his methods of reading, recollecting and reworking these sources. The authors posit Shakespeare as a ‘conflicted reader of the classics’ (9), simultaneously wanting to make use of, and move beyond, ancient sources and early modern intertexts (e.g. Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Arthur Golding’s translation). This is followed by a chapter on Shakespeare’s schooling and the ‘emphatically time-bound’ (14) nature of education as it is represented in his works (William P. Weaver). Chapter 3 (Liz Oakley-Brown) focuses on some early modern translations with which Shakespeare might have been most familiar, and how these translations of Ovid, Homer and Apuleius could have crucially influenced works such as Venus and Adonis, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Troilus and Cressida. In Chapter 4, ‘Comedy and Tragedy’, Tanya Pollard argues that Shakespeare combined Greek and Roman models and characters, in both his comedies and his tragedies, in his innovative pursuit of ‘distinctive hybrid forms’ (42). Pamela Royston Macfie’s chapter on the sonnets and narrative poems proposes melding of a different kind. She argues that in his sonnets, Shakespeare combined classical sources (Ovid) with the medieval (Petrarch), while Venus and Adonis absorbs various Ovidian sources (the Metamorphoses and Amores), using these to strike a balance between acknowledging the past and forecasting the survival of the poetry being created.
Section 2 further considers what the editors term the ‘intellectual culture of Renaissance England’, and ‘the range of learned disciplines in which Shakespeare encountered classical literature’ (3), but there remains a useful crossover between sections. Just as the volume as a whole thinks of the term ‘classic’ in more than one way, in Chapter 6, Leah Whittington considers Shakespeare’s ‘grammar’, both in terms of the familiar topic of the influence of his own grammar schooling and in terms of how his study of Latin grammar in particular is reflected in his plays. These influences might reveal themselves in scenes of instruction and misunderstanding, in plays as diverse as Titus Andronicus and The Merry Wives of Windsor, or else in what the author terms ‘the syntactic flexibility and plasticity of Shakespeare’s vernacular style’, which constitutes a move away from his schoolroom models, and even ‘a self-conscious program of anti-Latinity’ (98). This sense, reflected in various essays in the first section, that Shakespeare’s relationship with classical texts, modes and languages might be questioning, transformative or even combative, is also apparent in Chapter 7. Here, Nick Moschovakis shows how classical rhetorical and dialectical techniques of the kind Shakespeare might have encountered in the schoolroom (e.g. the rhetorical device of encomium) might be used ironically, sceptically or questioningly, rather than obediently imitated.
If subtlety and lightness of touch is evident in Shakespeare’s use of such classical techniques, other authors see it in his engagement with broader aspects of classical intellectual culture. In her essay on Shakespeare’s history and geography (Chapter 8), Jane Grogan draws attention to ‘[t]he macaronic and commingled character of Shakespeare’s classical reading’ (145) and argues that this is reflected in his interest in classical history and geography. ‘[L]ess showy’ than Jonson’s engagement with such subjects (138), Shakespeare’s weaving of his reading into his plays demonstrates a sensitivity to other cultures and (again) a refusal to uncritically accept the models offered by the ancient past. Sarah Annes Brown’s essay, ‘Shakespeare and Myth’ (Chapter 9), shows how one appeal of myth, for Shakespeare and for other authors, was its ‘lability’, the way that well-known mythic stories might suggest but not compel particular responses, containing instead ‘polysemous possibilities’ (156) for the interested author and reader alike. The chapter demonstrates how Shakespeare uses mythical material in his plays, complicating and destabilising both the myth and the act of recreation as he does so (e.g. via his uses of the Diana and Actaeon myth in Twelfth Night and Titus Andronicus). However, it also provides a bridge between earlier and later chapters in the collection and reminds us of the plurality that this volume sees as inherent to the terms ‘classic’ and ‘myth’, asking to what extent Shakespeare’s works themselves have achieved mythic status and have become a source of similar inspiration for later authors. Science fiction by authors including Alex Irvine and Dan Simmons is used to show how Shakespeare’s work can be altered, appropriated and reinterpreted for new readerships.
In Chapter 10, similar to Grogan in Chapter 8, Jean E. Feerick sees a subtle interweaving of Shakespeare’s interest in ancient cosmology and in ‘prevalent cosmological traditions’ (173), arguing that his reading of Ovid in particular allows Shakespeare to add a classically influenced depth to plays including Hamlet and King Lear. Perhaps more immediately obvious (in some of Shakespeare’s plays at least) is his interest in ancient politics, and in Chapter 11, Amelia Zurcher discusses some of the ways in which critics have attempted to read Shakespeare’s engagement with contemporary politics via his interest in the political structures of the ancient world. Of course, pinning Shakespeare down in this way is a task made vastly more difficult due to his reluctance to state explicitly the links he perceives between figures and events of the ancient past and the early modern present. Zurcher argues that his use of diverse classical sources within a single work is echoed by a shifting or inconsistent attitude to (for example) monarchy across his writing, and she provides a valuable overview of how critics have read the essentially (and frustratingly) elusive nature of Shakespeare’s pronounced interest in ancient politics.
Chapter 12 (Robert Hornback) introduces the third section, on drama and classicism, showing how early modern authors before Shakespeare made use of Roman models of drama, but how such models themselves also worked with and against their own Greek inheritance. For example, Plautus’ plays draw attention to staples of Greek drama in order to mock or subvert them, constituting a ‘writing back’ to his source texts and to the culture in which they were produced (207). Chapter 13 (Jeanne H. McCarthy) demonstrates, via a rich array of examples, how classicism gradually came to infiltrate popular drama as Shakespeare’s career progressed, despite the conflicted (or even hostile) attitudes of university-educated men, who felt that any such push to stage classicism was indecorous, incongruous or simply off-putting for audiences. Chapter 14 (Mark Bayer) discusses the dramatic output of Thomas Heywood, a committed classicist who understood the crucial importance of such commercial stage audiences. The essay contrasts Heywood’s two Trojan plays, The Iron Age 1 and 2, with Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, arguing that the differing treatment of the same iconic story is probably informed by the different audiences and theatrical contexts for which the plays were composed. While Bayer rightly notes that the exuberant staging of the Ages plays constitutes just one of the various ways in which Heywood communicated mythic stories to his readers and audiences, this method seems to have been highly successful. Bayer highlights one 1654 account of a performance of The Iron Age 1, which records a butcher apparently leaping onstage to help Hector fight Achilles (231), and he contrasts the ‘spectators’ communal engagement with the play’ that such a reaction suggests, to the ‘collective antipathy’ felt by early audiences of Jonson’s Sejanus (232). Chapter 15 (Jennifer Waldron) continues the conversations about the theatrical potential of myth, and about the decorum of staging myth, which were instituted by Bayer’s and McCarthy’s chapters. She shows that in Julius Caesar, Shakespeare alters the account of Caesar’s assassination he would have found in Sir Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch, to make it more ritualised and self-consciously theatrical; in so doing, Shakespeare intervenes in contemporary debates about the propriety of staging scenes of sacrifice.
Chapter 16 (Michael Chemers) looks not at Shakespeare as adapter, but at how he was adapted, focusing on how eighteenth-century continental receptions of Hamlet grappled with the presentation of his stage ghosts, and how French and German authors worked with or against Shakespeare’s staging of the supernatural. Chapter 17 (Poonam Trivedi) stays with the eighteenth century, but looks further geographically, considering how the huge swell of English interest in Sanskrit literature in the period led critics to seek affinities between the works of Shakespeare, and those of the ancient dramatist Kalidasa, termed ‘the Shakespeare of India’ by the English Orientalist and translator Sir William Jones (259). After surveying various historical efforts to read Shakespeare’s and Kalidasa’s plays side by side, Trivedi notes that Shakespeare still retains a significant presence in Indian classrooms (though his works have also made way for study of the Eastern classics). Chapter 18 shows how Shakespeare’s works might be taught today, in universities or in school classrooms, in forms that are original, exciting and crucially classically oriented. This section takes the form of ten mini chapters, all of which present short case studies covering teaching activities such as close readings of Othello and sections of Plutarch (Stella Achilleos); studying Antony and Cleopatra as a ‘remix’ (274) of the Aeneid (Emma K. Atwood); planning a research essay on Shakespeare’s use of ‘medieval classics of English literature’ (275) (Nadia Bishai); and reading Mark Twain’s burlesquing of Shakespeare in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn via study of nineteenth-century editions of Hamlet (Donna Brewer). Other classroom activities include an introduction to the conventions of ‘Old’ and ‘New’ comedy, and consideration of how the changes Shakespeare makes to Plautus in The Comedy of Errors are inflected by audience expectations (Nicole DeWall); an imitation of the humanist schoolroom practices of translation and retranslation, using Shakespearean speeches (Jennie C. Mann); a study of the classical rhetorical figures used in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Scott L. Newstok); reading the sonnets as an example of copia (Catherine Nicholson); an exercise focused on unpacking apparently minor classical allusions in The Tempest (Stephen Schillinger); and an introduction to ‘the Ciceronian mnemonic method’ (295) as demonstrated in Shakespeare’s history plays (Jennifer C. Vaught). This chapter is also available online, and will be augmented by further contributions, the editors envisioning ‘an increasingly comprehensive resource for the use of teachers around the world’ (270); such a resource is very welcome, and I look forward to seeing it develop. Chapter 19 (Jim Kearney) usefully proffers a more extended consideration of how Shakespeare might be used in the classroom, arguing that reading Timon of Athens alongside Sophocles’ Philoctetes and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics can prompt wider discussion about a range of philosophical problems, such as the importance of individual human life versus the needs of the community. As Kearney notes (298), this is not to assume Shakespeare’s direct knowledge of the Greek works. Rather, in common with many of the case studies in Chapter 18, the aim is to set Shakespeare and the classics side by side to their mutual benefit, giving students the tools and opportunity to think about philosophical problems in terms that are both classical and Shakespearean.
In their introduction, the editors assert that the volume ‘does not aim to close the question of whether Shakespeare belongs fully in the company of the ancient “classics”, but to pose it’ (2). In a brief concluding chapter, Sean Keilen reminds us that even as early as 1598, Francis Meres was thinking of Shakespeare as keeping company with ancient dramatists like Plautus and Seneca, and seemed to feel that, by acknowledging their abilities, he could praise Shakespeare (in contrast, Keilen argues that Jonson’s famous tribute is more focused on Shakespeare’s achievements). The chapter briefly traces the eighteenth-, nineteenth- and twentieth-century interest in Shakespeare’s classical learning, noting that as commentators increasingly acknowledged the limits of this learning, his literal distance from the texts, in the eyes of some, ‘Shakespeare becomes something greater than a classic, because he lacks a classical education. He becomes a genius’ (314). Keilen contrasts historical and recent attitudes to both Shakespeare and the concept of ‘the classic’, showing that cultural importance does not need to imply rigidity or unchangeability and ending with the hope that criticism of Shakespeare and the classics might continue to develop in exciting and inclusive new directions.
This volume unarguably contributes to the development of such a new and symbiotic scholarship on Shakespeare, the classics and ‘the classic’. Some individual chapters are very brief, with the result that (as several contributors note) arguments need to be summarised, or individual works gestured towards only very briefly. It is also regrettable that the hardback price of GB£150 will make the physical volume less likely to find its way onto course reading lists at universities, especially given the clear, engaging and well-illustrated nature of so many of the contributions (however, there is a much less expensive e-book version available). This companion covers a truly impressive amount of ground: its myriad approaches and wide-ranging chapters prompting us to think differently (both as researchers and teachers) about the classicism of Shakespeare’s own works, their various theatrical and literary contexts and their enduring and evolving legacies.