COLIN BURROW. Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity.

Abstract

Shakespeare’s knowledge and use of the classics have been a topic of debate ever since Ben Jonson’s teasing reference to his ‘small Latin and less Greek’, and the small flurry which this book set off in the letter column of the TLS suggests that the debate still has an edge. Colin Burrow’s lucid, engaging and occasionally provocative Oxford Shakespeare Topics volume ‘seeks to position Shakespeare within a larger narrative about changing understandings of classical antiquity in the late Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, and within a larger story about Renaissance attitudes to the classical past’ (p. 3). His title phrase ‘classical antiquity’—not one Shakespeare would have used, and one which may sound fustily nineteenth-century today—suggests a focus on the oldness and pastness of the classical past. Shakespeare may not have exactly the humanist nostalgia for an unattainably lost classical world that Thomas Greene diagnosed in The Light in Troy, but his exploitation of literary effects of anachronism and ‘ancientness’ can have a very similar effect. At the same time, Burrow emphasizes that Shakespeare’s view of the classics was not fixed at the point he left grammar school, but continues to evolve throughout his career in response to new classical texts (such as Plutarch), the influence of his contemporaries, changing theatrical conditions and changing concepts of the ‘classical’. Burrow’s historicist focus makes him particularly sensitive to the layering of different periods in Shakespeare’s classically influenced texts.