Shakespeare and the Uses of Antiquity

Shakespeare and the Uses of Antiquity
Author: Charles Martindale
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 246
Release: 1994
Genre: Civilization, Ancient, in literature
ISBN: 9780415104265

Against a recent tendency to exaggerate Shakespeare's classical learning, this study examines how the playwright used his relatively restricted knowledge to create an unusually convincing picture of Rome.

Shakespeare and the Uses of Antiquity

Shakespeare and the Uses of Antiquity
Author: Michelle Martindale
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2005-07-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1134848501

Although a third of his plays are set in the ancient world and he constantly used classical mythology, history, and ideas, Shakespeare received a simple grammar school education and did not have a scholar's knowledge of the classics. The critical implications of this are the subject of Shakespeare and the Uses of Antiquity. Against a recent academic tendency to exaggerate Shakespeare's learning, the authors investigate how he used his comparatively restricted knowledge to create, for example, an unusually convincing picture of Rome, and analyse, by presenting us with careful readings of specific passages, the styles Shakespeare employed under the influence of classical writers, especially Ovid, Seneca, and (in translation) Homer and Plutarch.

Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity

Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity
Author: Colin Burrow
Publisher: Oxford Shakespeare Topics
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2013-09-05
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0199684782

This book explains for students and scholars the nature and extent of Shakespeare's classical learning. It shows why Ben Jonson was wrong to claim that he had 'small Latin and less Greek', and demonstrates that Shakespeare acquired the central foundations of his art from his classical reading. It explores in detail his relationship to Virgil, Ovid, Plautus, Terence, Seneca, and Plutarch, as well as showing how his beliefs about and attitudes towards classicalliterature changed in the course of his career.

How the Classics Made Shakespeare

How the Classics Made Shakespeare
Author: Jonathan Bate
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 378
Release: 2020-10-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0691210144

"This book grew from the inaugural E. H. Gombrich Lectures in the Classical Tradition that I delivered in the autumn of 2013 at the Warburg Institute of the University of London, under the title, "Ancient Strength: Shakespeare and the Classical Tradition"--Preface, page ix.

Harmful Eloquence

Harmful Eloquence
Author: Michael L. Stapleton
Publisher:
Total Pages: 200
Release: 1996
Genre: History
ISBN:

M. L. Stapleton's Harmful Eloquence: Ovid's Amores from Antiquity to Shakespeare traces the influence of the early elegiac poetry of Publius Ovidius Naso (43 B.C.E.-17 C.E.) on European literature from 500-1600 C.E. The Amores served as a classical model for love poetry in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and were essential to the formation of fin' Amors, or "courtly love". Medieval Latin poets, the troubadours, Dante, Petrarch, and Shakespeare were all familiar with Ovid in his various forms, and all depended greatly upon his Amores in composing their cansos, canzoniere, and sonnets. Harmful Eloquence begins with a detailed analysis of the Amores themselves and their artistic unity. It moves on to explain the fragmentary transmission of the Amores fragments in the "Latin Anthology" and the cohesion of the fragments into the conventions of medieval Latin and troubadour "courtly love" poetry. Two subsequent chapters explain the use of the Amores, their narrator, and the conventions of "courtly love" in the poetry of both Dante and Petrarch. The final chapter concentrates on Shakespeare's reprocessing and parody of this material in his sonnets. Medievalists, classicists, and scholars of Renaissance studies will find Harmful Eloquence particularly engaging and useful. This work has received early praise for its Shakespearean content and is vital to scholars in this area. Stapleton's scholarship is both enjoyable and readable with a contemporary approach.

Shakespeare and the Classics

Shakespeare and the Classics
Author: Charles Martindale
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2011-02-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781139453639

Shakespeare and the Classics demonstrates that the classics are of central importance in Shakespeare's plays and in the structure of his imagination. Written by an international team of Shakespeareans and classicists, this book investigates Shakespeare's classicism and shows how he used a variety of classical books to explore crucial areas of human experience such as love, politics, ethics and history. The book focuses on Shakespeare's favourite classical authors, especially Ovid, Virgil, Seneca, Plautus and Terence, and, in translation only, Plutarch. Attention is also paid to the humanist background and to Shakespeare's knowledge of Greek literature and culture. The final section, from the perspective of reception, examines how Shakespeare's classicism was seen and used by later writers. This accessible book offers a rounded and comprehensive treatment of Shakespeare's classicism and will be a useful first port of call for students and others approaching the subject.

Rethinking Shakespeare's Political Philosophy

Rethinking Shakespeare's Political Philosophy
Author: Alex Schulman
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2014-07-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0748682422

What were Shakespeare's politics? As this study demonstrates, contained in Shakespeare's plays is an astonishingly powerful reckoning with the tradition of Western political thought, one whose depth and scope places Shakespeare alongside Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes and others. This book is the first attempt by a political theorist to read Shakespeare within the trajectory of political thought as one of the authors of modernity. From Shakespeare's interpretation of ancient and medieval politics to his wrestling with issues of legitimacy, religious toleration, family conflict, and economic change, Alex Schulman shows how Shakespeare produces a fascinating map of modern politics at its crisis-filled birth. As a result, there are brand new readings of Troilus and Cressida, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, King Lear, Richard II and Henry IV, parts I and II , The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure.

Shakespeare and Greece

Shakespeare and Greece
Author: Alison Findlay
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 205
Release: 2017-01-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1474244262

This book seeks to invert Ben Jonson's claim that Shakespeare had 'small Latin and less Greek' and to prove that, in fact, there is more Greek and less Latin in a significant group of Shakespeare's texts: a group whose generic hybridity (tragic-comical-historical-romance) exemplifies the hybridity of Greece in the early modern imagination. To early modern England, Greece was an enigma. It was the origin and idealised pinnacle of Western philosophy, tragedy, democracy, heroic human endeavour and, at the same time, an example of decadence: a fallen state, currently under Ottoman control, and therefore an exotic, dangerous, 'Other' in the most disturbing senses of the word. Indeed, while Britain was struggling to establish itself as a nation state and an imperial authority by emulating classical Greek models, this ambition was radically unsettled by early modern Greece's subjection to the Ottoman Empire, which rendered Europe's eastern borders dramatically vulnerable. Focusing, for the first time, on Shakespeare's 'Greek' texts (Venus and Adonis, The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Love's Labour's Lost, Troilus and Cressida, Timon of Athens, King Lear, Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen), the volume considers how Shakespeare's use of antiquity and Greek myth intersects with early modern perceptions of the country and its empire.

Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity

Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity
Author: Colin Burrow
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2013-09-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0191507687

OXFORD SHAKESPEARE TOPICS General Editors: Peter Holland and Stanley Wells Oxford Shakespeare Topics provide students and teachers with short books on important aspects of Shakespeare criticism and scholarship. Each book is written by an authority in its field, and combines accessible style with original discussion of its subject. This book explains that Shakespeare did not have 'small Latin and less Greek' as Ben Jonson claimed. Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity shows the range, extent and variety of Shakespeare's responses to classical antiquity. Individual chapters on Virgil, Ovid, Classical Comedy, Seneca, and Plutarch show how Shakespeare's understanding of and use of classical authors, and of the classical past more generally, changed and developed in the course of his career. An opening chapter shows the kind of classical learning he acquired through his education, and subsequent chapters provide stimulating introductions to a range of classical authors as well as to Shakespeare's responses to them. Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity shows how Shakespeare's relationship to classical authors changed in response to contemporary events and to contemporary authors. Above all, it shows that Shakespeare's reading in classical literature informed more or less every aspect of his work.

The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus

The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus
Author: William Shakespeare
Publisher: BoD - Books on Demand
Total Pages: 127
Release: 2024-04-01
Genre: Poetry
ISBN:

"The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus" by William Shakespeare is a gripping and intense drama that explores themes of revenge, betrayal, and the destructive consequences of violence. Set in ancient Rome, the play follows the tragic downfall of the noble general Titus Andronicus and his family as they become embroiled in a cycle of vengeance and bloodshed. At the heart of the story is the brutal conflict between Titus Andronicus and Tamora, Queen of the Goths, whose sons are executed by Titus as retribution for their crimes. In retaliation, Tamora and her lover, Aaron the Moor, orchestrate a series of heinous acts of revenge against Titus and his family, plunging them into a spiral of madness and despair. As the body count rises and the atrocities escalate, Titus is consumed by grief and rage, leading to a climactic showdown that culminates in a shocking and tragic conclusion. Along the way, Shakespeare explores themes of honor, justice, and the nature of humanity, offering a searing indictment of the cycle of violence and the capacity for cruelty that lies within us all.