
How the Classics Made Shakespeare
How the Classics Made Shakespeare
Jonathan Bate
ISBN: 9780691161600
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Hardback
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Overview
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.