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.
Les mer
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780691185637
Publisert
2019
Utgiver
Vendor
Princeton University Press
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter