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How the Classics Made Shakespeare , by Jonathan Bate

Article  in  Translation and Literature · March 2020

DOI: 10.3366/tal.2020.0414

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 REVIEW

How the Classics Made Shakespeare. By Jonathan Bate. Pp. xiv + 361.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. Hb. £22.

Riding a swell of interest in Shakespeare and the classics, Jonathan Bate’s

inaugural E. H. Gombrich Lectures in the Classical Tradition (2013),
now much expanded, discover in Shakespeare’s relationship to ancient
literature ‘a way of thinking, a form of intelligence’. Intelligentia here
means something other than school-learning and more than cleverness.
The classics shaped Shakespeare’s ‘cast of mind’ as well as giving him an
arsenal of rhetoric and narratives on which to draw. It is this ‘common
currency’ on which the book focuses: ‘Cicero, Virgil, Ovid, Horace, and
Seneca’, though Plutarch also plays a large role. What Bate has to add
in particular is Shakespeare’s occasionally Horatian tone, and his
exemplary use of Cicero, both of which have been under-examined in
previous scholarship. Above all, his careful distinction of Shakespeare’s
‘intelligence’ from the question of ‘What did Shakespeare believe?’
promises to open up Shakespeare’s inner world, beyond Catholic
Shakespeare, Republican Shakespeare, and William’s other historicist
siblings. Turning to Shakespeare’s literary acculturation enables the step
into language, posits a defence of the imagination, and thus performs
the opening manoeuvre of the kind of literary criticism that the
fourteen chapters of this book present.
The first four chapters outline the book’s main themes. After the
introductory first chapter, which sketches the key alignment of poetry
with magic, enchantment, and imagination, Chapter 2 signals the book’s
origins at the Warburg Institute by taking up the ancient agon between
picture and poetry. Shakespeare learned the art of ‘reanimation’ from
Plutarch and Ovid, writing poetry in Venus and Adonis (and beyond) that
emulated and outstripped the visual arts through energeia, the verbal art
of presenting ‘antique figures in motion’. Chapter 3 examines rhetorical

Translation and Literature, 29 (2020), 154–61

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inheritance, in particular the device of paradigma, ‘resemblance

by example’; characters such as Hamlet and Lady Macbeth harness
a ‘personalized rhetoric of illustrative parallel’ to seize or abjure the
narrative energies of Neros and Medeas. Chapter 4 asks how the classics
underwrote the development of a national literature, initially through
English historiography and later through genre. The system of classical
genres, codified and popularized through Webbe’s Discourse of English
Poetry (1586), leads to Shakespeare’s coronation by Francis Meres
as ‘England’s myriad-mused stylist’.
Subsequent chapters return to and flesh out these themes. Chapter 5
looks more closely at the Elizabethan generic landscape. Seneca
and Plautus provided early models of tragedy and comedy, which by
the mid-point of Shakespeare’s career were evolving – thanks to Italian
innovations such as Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido and Greek romance by authors
such as Heliodorus – into new forms crucial to Shakespeare’s late
plays, for example pastoral tragicomedy. Chapters 6 and 7 resume the
discussion of English ethno-national identity and canon formation. In
London, Shakespeare was surrounded by architecture that evoked ‘the
example of ancient Rome’ and conjured its historical associations,
the republic of Cicero. Bate traces the language of ‘civil war’ in histories
and Roman plays to Cicero’s notion of the civitas, a citizenry united
under law, giving particular attention to Julius Caesar, in which Cicero
appears as a character, and De officiis, the central Ciceronian text that
establishes public duty as ‘the absolute basis of what may properly be
described as the Ciceronian ethos of the ruling class’.
Yet the masculine duty and heroism of Rome are soon to the
block. Chapter 8 introduces Virgil’s Aeneid as the model of heroic
action, but quickly finds in Shakespeare a ‘counter-Virgilian, or at least
an antiheroic, imagination’, which undercuts public duty with private
passion. ‘The Ovidian trumps the Virgilian’, The Rape of Lucrece signals
‘the fall of the heroic idiom as poetic model’, and in Hamlet Shakespeare
introduces a pause into the Player’s Virgilian speech about Priam’s death
at Pyrrhus’ hand, which signals Hamlet’s hesitant emergence as
a ‘new and very modern … existential hero’. Chapter 9 completes the
retreat from heroism with a fine analysis of Horace’s ‘gentlemanly
sensibility’ in Shakespeare’s movement from negotium to otium, city and
court to the garden. Horatian Shakespeare is ‘Epicurean, not Stoic’,
filled with affection for the carnal, Falstaffian pleasure-seekers of his
histories and pastoral comedies.
Chapter 10 returns to formal poetics, pitting Puttenham’s and
Sidney’s arguments for poetry as feigning against those of their Puritan
opponents. Shakespeare absorbed these arguments into his portrayal of

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magic, visions, dreams, and tricks, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and

The Tempest. Chapter 11 considers Ovidian love-madness in the form of
hereos, an ‘aberrant medical condition’ from Greek medicine. In his
‘anatomy of desire’ in Venus and Adonis, Antony and Cleopatra, and,
illuminatingly, Timon of Athens, Shakespeare is ‘continuing Ovid’s work of
undoing Virgil’. In Chapter 12, the mythical figure of Hercules as he was
passed down through Seneca’s Hercules furens becomes the paradigm of
explosive tragic anger, and is deployed through that rhetorical device
in Love’s Labour’s Lost and Antony and Cleopatra. Chapter 13 charts the
evolution of Shakespeare’s ghosts, in a familiar line-up including Hamlet
and Julius Caesar, from classical, Senecan ‘harbingers’ of revenge,
through revenants from Catholic purgatory, to their Protestant intern-
alization as mental states. Finally, Chapter 14 revisits Bate’s earlier work
and tells the story of how Shakespeare himself became a ‘classic’, from
the First Folio which organized his work by genre, through Garrick’s
corny, influential Jubilee on the bicentenary of his birth, to his gradual
supplanting of the classics in the hands of those whom classical education
traditionally excluded: nonconformists, the working classes, women, and
colonial subjects.
As this summary suggests, this book on Shakespeare and the classics
is organized neither by Shakespeare nor the classics. Instead Bate’s
argument unfolds – or ‘infolds’, to use Edgar Wind’s Warburgian term –
associatively, darting between multiple sources to trace the classical roots
of Shakespeare’s acculturation, rather than fixing debt or influence
in any straightforward way. Ovid is the muse of Bate’s metamorphic art
no less than Shakespeare’s, telling as it does of a protean mind shaped
into new forms; the book’s principal argument is that ‘the influence
of the classical tradition on Shakespeare’s culture was so pervasive that
an understanding of the shaping of his own mind by the classics should
not be confined to the influence of his schoolroom education and
his direct reading of such works as Golding’s Ovid and North’s Plutarch.’
At its best, this allusive approach yields flashes of sudden insight,
drawn from Bate’s forty-year treasury of teaching and reading. Striking
connections are made to Shakespeare’s mid-career lodging with a
London wigmaker and the paintings on the walls at Essex House; to
Francis Meres’ view from Botolph Lane in Eastcheap; to the mythological
paraphernalia in Philip Henslowe’s prop-cupboard – ‘Cerberus’s head,
a lion skin, a club, and the apples from the gardens of the Hesperides’.
Sentences like ‘the streets and the marketplaces of Rome were as central
to Terence and Plautus as the sidewalks and subways of New York are
to Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen’ will earn the book a place in many
a classroom.

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To enumerate such highlights in full would take too long. Bate makes
excellent use of William Scott’s Model of Poesy (1599), which has only
just begun its slow absorption into the critical mainstream following
Gavin Alexander’s exemplary edition of 2013. The chapter on Horace,
gentlemanly amicitia, and the retreat to the garden is especially good,
as is Bate’s demonstration that ‘reading texts … were given the classical
label in a way that performance texts were not’. And Shakespearean
apocrypha, such as less familiar scenes from the anonymous Edward III,
are a refreshing addition to the argument, as might be expected from
Bate’s sterling editorial work on the collaborative plays.
This mode of argument must have made for dazzling lectures, but in
book form it is not without its downsides. Indeed the word ‘argument’ is
used only a handful of times in the book, indicating not the lack of one,
but an unwillingness to make it too explicit. The thematic focus of the
chapters, as I have described them above, is sometimes clear only from
a distance, and the style is so restless that for long stretches it departs
entirely from ‘the classics’. Gestures towards Ficino and Bruno suggest
some of the more esoteric Renaissance sources from which a long
discussion of love may have derived, cousins of Neoplatonism but firmly
post-classical regardless. A more robust theoretical distinction between
‘classical’ and ‘Renaissance’ is necessary here than Bate is willing to pro-
vide. He quotes Harry Berger approvingly for the view that ‘serious
delight in feigning was an historical novelty in the Renaissance and was
indeed symptomatic of a sea-change undergone by the mind of Europe
between the fourteenth and the seventeenth century’. But if Berger is
right, in what sense was it really the ‘classics’ that made Shakespeare?
And what might it mean to attribute to the ‘classics’ strains of thought
unprecedented before the fourteenth century? As the introduction
implies, the concept of the ‘classics’ may be more useful for us, as a
means of talking about a particular form of literary imagination, than it
was for Shakespeare.
Though there is plenty to learn from an associative approach, the
engine of any book on Shakespeare’s classicism must be a working model
of Shakespeare’s access to the classics. But to look under the hood is to
find a rather conservative model of Shakespeare’s learning and linguistic
access. Readers of Translation and Literature will find notice of North’s
Plutarch, Golding’s Ovid, Field’s Lipsius, Underdowne’s Heliodorus,
Newton’s anthology Seneca His Tenne Tragedies, Harington’s Orlando,
Chapman’s Homer, and Florio’s Montaigne; numerous English Virgils
are discussed in an appendix (which offers some excellent reflections on
Stanyhurst), albeit in the absence of ‘firm evidence of Shakespeare’s
knowledge of them’. These works of translation played no small part,

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Bate argues, in the blossoming of England’s national literature. The

prestige of Virgil was such that translation of the Aeneid ‘became a sign
of the maturation of a national literary culture’; Meres and others
competed to compare Spensers, Marlowes, Shakespeares, and Jonsons
with Virgils, Horaces, and Ovids. Nor were classical authors merely casual
acquaintances of Shakespeare, whom we find not only scrutinizing
Plutarch’s life of Mark Anthony, but possibly reading Ovid’s Fasti even
though no translation existed, and imitating, ‘via an unknown inter-
mediate source’, an epigram in the Greek Anthology at the close of the
Sonnets.
Yet this list raises more questions than it answers. If Bate thinks
Shakespeare was limited to English translations, what business does
he have possibly reading the Fasti? But then, if Bate thinks he could
have read the Fasti, was he really limited to English translations? The
question of ‘small Latin and less Greek’ is at the heart of scholarship on
Shakespeare’s classicism, but Bate is not at all clear where he stands. His
explicit position is both correct and these days orthodox: ‘the “small
Latin” of a provincial grammar-school boy in the age of the first Queen
Elizabeth would have been large by the standards of many a university
Classics graduate in the age of the second’. Yet the clarity of this position
is muddied by the ensuing 300 pages in which Shakespeare almost never
takes advantage of that not-so-small Latin. Bate stands behind the mass
of scholarship since T. W. Baldwin’s William Shakspere’s Small Latine and
Lesse Greeke (1944), but somehow principle has not been pursued into
consequence. It is as though a physics textbook began with a definition
of quantum mechanics only to devote every chapter after the first
to Newton.
The advantages of such an approach, I have suggested, are clear.
Liberated from the arachnid delicacy of source-work, Bate can draw out
correlations that are genuinely illuminating from a bird’s eye view. The
swirl of culture is more turbulent than can be mapped in detail; both
macroscopic and microscopic approaches have their complementary
strengths. Nevertheless, at this level of generality even large trends can be
misrepresented. I will suggest only two.
The first concerns Bate’s comparison between ‘the English vernacular
as opposed to the international (and Catholic) language of Latin’.
International, Latin certainly was. The fact that Philip Hentzner’s
Itinerarium (a tourist account of a visit to London in 1598, printed
1612), was written in Latin is seen by Bate as ‘a reminder that, despite the
religious break from Rome, England remained very much a part of a
common European culture with an international language and deep
roots in classical antiquity’. Yet the tone here is of surprise at something

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counter-intuitive, as it is when we read that ‘for that matter, learned

scholars such as Camden wrote in Latin as well as in English’. This is of
course quite right: Camden did write in Latin as well as in English, as did
Roger Ascham, Alexander Nowell, Matthew Parker, Robert Burton,
Thomas Watson, and Stephen Gosson, to pick a few of hundreds of
English literary figures listed in J. W. Binns’ Intellectual Culture in
Elizabethan and Jacobean England (1990), and a great many of them
were furnished with far better Protestant bona fides than either
Shakespeare or William Camden. To imagine that these writers,
functionally bilingual in Latin and English as all educated men were in
Shakespeare’s time, thought for a moment that their use of Latin was in
and of itself somehow Popish, is not only simplistic but plain wrong. It
suggests a map of Europe divided between Reformation England and
Catholic everywhere else, a map which recapitulates Catholic Italy’s
literary influence as political reality. Yet large swathes of Northern
Europe, England included, were just as Latinate as Italy while none-
theless firmly Protestant. (Their enormous literary influence in England
has also been overlooked, but that’s for another book.) When, for
example, Roger Ascham writes to the French humanist Hubert Leodius
in 1553 that ‘the Greek language is no more the property of the Greeks
than the Latin language is of the Italians’, the status of Latin as a
common inheritance across confessional lines is beyond question; it is
the measure, not the variable.
The opposition between Catholic Latin and Protestant English none-
theless recurs in several cognate arguments, for example a section
of Chapter 10 that seeks to demonstrate ‘the hostility of Protestantism
to the feigning imagination’ by way of a series of old chestnut binaries.
‘Reformation’ poetics are for Bate didactic, instrumental, earnestly
moral, hostile to imagination, while ‘Renaissance’ poetics are creative,
pleasurable, aesthetically autonomous, ludic, ‘multilayered and sceptical’.
‘For these reasons’, he declares, ‘“Reformation” poetics were extremely
suspicious of “Renaissance” ones.’ It is true, of course, that Sidney (the
exponent here of ‘Renaissance’ poetics) wrote of poetry as a ‘second’ or
‘golden’ world. But it may be objected that he also wrote of the ‘erected
wit’ and ‘infected will’, had more time for allegory than many critics
would like, and, as Robert Stillman has shown, was a scion of the school of
Philip Melanchthon. Bate writes of ‘tensions between classical and
Christian inheritances’ in Cymbeline, and of ‘the paradox whereby the
Renaissance delight in feigning was exercised and celebrated by writers
who were at the same time ideologically committed to the building of a
reformed English nation’. To the bird’s eye, perhaps. But Shakespeare
and his country folk lived on the ground, where the details are. If

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Christianity and the classics were patrimonies as truly universal as Bate

suggests, it is unlikely that these cases would have seemed paradoxical or
tense to any Elizabethan out of his precisian teens.
My second case is about Greek. If Bate grants Shakespeare Latin on a
technicality alone, he is hardly likely to allow him ‘less Greek’ – and
rightly so. Greek was taught consistently in late sixteenth-century
England, but only in the higher forms of the better grammar schools.
Stratford-upon-Avon was not one of them, and Shakespeare shows no
evidence of independent mastery of Greek. The thing is: if Shakespeare
had Latin, he also had access to almost all the Greek literature he could
ask for. Latin translation of Greek literature was a Europe-wide industry.
It had cultures of its own and became a site of literary competition as
fierce as anything on the English stage. But from a purely instrumental
point of view, Latin translation made Greek literature available to
everybody who read Latin, which was just about everybody who wrote the
kind of literature we read.
A few passing remarks give a glimpse of Greek: Bate’s précis of
deliberative rhetoric is mostly from Aristotle; he mentions Underdowne’s
Heliodorus as a source for Shakespeare’s late plays; he briefly refers to
Thomas Linacre and his role as a major scholar of Greek medicine. But
Greek literature is otherwise wholly unrepresented in this book. (I note
wearily that Aristotle’s Poetics, my own hobby-horse, is indexed under
Aristophanes.) Bate passes up the opportunities his discussion affords to
cite recent scholarship on Shakespeare’s Greek inheritance, among the
most exciting in the last decade. John Kerrigan’s Shakespeare’s Originality
is cited, but not for his beautiful chapter on Lear and Oedipus at Colonus;
Lynn Enterline’s work on Elizabethan schooling is cited, but not as an
argument for the influence of Aphthonius; and there is nothing of
Jessica Wolfe or Tania Demetriou on Homer, Louise Schleiner on
Latinized Greek drama in Hamlet, Robert Miola on Antigone and
Orestes, Neil Rhodes on Lucian and Greek epyllion, and above all Tanya
Pollard on Hamlet and Hecuba, Shakespeare and the Greek tragedians.
Lip-service is not the point here: whole libraries could be reconstituted
out of the excellent work Bate does cite, and perhaps he thinks this line
of investigation is hogwash. But he does make an oddly ungenerous dig a
few pages in, defending the need for another book on Shakespeare and
the classics:

Why add to the groaning shelf? Partly because certain aspects of

Shakespeare’s classical inheritance have been curiously neglected,
perhaps because they are hiding in plain sight. It is always easier for a
scholar to be ‘original’ by positing a ‘hitherto unknown obscure source’

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than by remaining focused on the common currency of the canonical

figures who shaped a tradition – in our case, most notably Cicero, Virgil,
Ovid, Horace, and Seneca.

Any scholar writing on Shakespeare’s classicism knows that Shakespeare

has been rescued from his reputation as an unlettered genius only by the
patient labour of generations of scholars pinning down every guy-rope,
tracing every reference, and yes, positing hitherto unknown obscure
sources. It is one thing to believe, as Bate does, that there were enough
ways to know things in Elizabethan England that Shakespeare ‘did not
need’ first-hand access to Xenophon in order to learn of the choice of
Hercules, ‘since it was one of those classical influences that permeated
the cultural air of his age’. It is quite another not to recognize that
yesterday’s ‘obscure source’ is today’s canon. That is how ‘hitherto’
works.
The result is a strange mixture of freshness and conservatism. In this
book Shakespeare is one moment comfortable in Latin, the next limited
to English translations. His audience is one moment intimately familiar
with the myth of Niobe, the next ‘unlettered’. On one hand, Bate moves
sophisticatedly beyond the demand for literal echoes. On the other, his
canon remains Baldwin’s: Latin, middle of the road, built out of literal
echoes. In a book as vigorous and often delightful as How the Classics Made
Shakespeare, this should make any scholar – or perhaps just the ‘original’
ones – raise an eyebrow.
MICHA LAZARUS
Trinity College, Cambridge
DOI: 10.3366/tal.2020.0414

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