Pure and Common Greek in Early Tudor England

Abstract

My title ‘pure and common Greek’ comes from the last of a series of polemics fired off by the militant Catholic, John Rastell, against John Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury, printed in Antwerp in 1566. On the face of it the phrase is nicely paradoxical, like the mechanicals’ ‘tedious brief scene … of very tragical mirth’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. After all, few attainments carry a greater air of elitism about them than the ability to read classical Greek. There is certainly nothing ‘common’ about it. Virginia Woolf found the remoteness of the Greeks reassuring: ‘Fate … has preserved them from vulgarity’, she declared in The Common Reader.1 More recently, the exclusiveness of Greek helps to account for the extraordinary success of Donna Tartt’s novel, The Secret History, where the reader enjoys the sense of special access to the private and privileged world of the Hampden Greek class while remaining, like its narrator, an outsider. But the aura of elitism, social as well as academic, that surrounds the study of classical Greek in the English-speaking world is not something that was present from the start. In the early sixteenth century, when Greek learning was first established in England, its role was far from being purely ornamental. Indeed, like all novelties, it was viewed with suspicion by many.