From one of our most eminent and accessible literary critics, a
groundbreaking account of how the Greek and Roman classics forged
Shakespeare's imagination
Ben Jonson famously accused Shakespeare of having "small Latin and less
Greek." But he was exaggerating. Shakespeare was steeped in the
classics. Shaped by his grammar school education in Roman literature,
history, and rhetoric, he moved to London, a city that modeled itself on
ancient Rome. He worked in a theatrical profession that had inherited
the conventions and forms of classical drama, and he read deeply in
Ovid, Virgil, and Seneca. In a book of extraordinary range, acclaimed
literary critic and biographer Jonathan Bate, one of the world's leading
authorities on Shakespeare, offers groundbreaking insights into how,
perhaps more than any other influence, the classics made Shakespeare the
writer he became.
Revealing in new depth the influence of Cicero and Horace on Shakespeare
and finding new links between him and classical traditions, ranging from
myths and magic to monuments and politics, Bate offers striking new
readings of a wide array of the plays and poems. At the heart of the
book is an argument that Shakespeare's supreme valuation of the force of
imagination was honed by the classical tradition and designed as a
defense of poetry and theater in a hostile world of emergent Puritanism.
Rounded off with a fascinating account of how Shakespeare became our
modern classic and has ended up playing much the same role for us as the
Greek and Roman classics did for him, How the Classics Made
Shakespeare combines stylistic brilliance, accessibility, and
scholarship, demonstrating why Jonathan Bate is one of our most eminent
and readable literary critics.
