Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: a Roman thought
- 1 Roman historians and the myth of Rome
- 2 The wronged Lucretia and the early republic
- 3 Self-inflicted wounds
- 4 ‘Like a Colossus’: Julius Caesar
- 5 Ben Jonson's Rome
- 6 O'erflowing the measure: Antony and Cleopatra
- 7 The city and the battlefield: Coriolanus
- 8 Tyranny and empire
- 9 Ancient Britons and Romans
- Postscript: Shakespeare and the republican tradition
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Roman historians and the myth of Rome
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 March 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: a Roman thought
- 1 Roman historians and the myth of Rome
- 2 The wronged Lucretia and the early republic
- 3 Self-inflicted wounds
- 4 ‘Like a Colossus’: Julius Caesar
- 5 Ben Jonson's Rome
- 6 O'erflowing the measure: Antony and Cleopatra
- 7 The city and the battlefield: Coriolanus
- 8 Tyranny and empire
- 9 Ancient Britons and Romans
- Postscript: Shakespeare and the republican tradition
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
SMALL LATIN AND LESS GREEK
Ben Jonson, in rather sour remarks about his rival playwright, described Shakespeare as having ‘small Latin and less Greek’. A tradition, especially prominent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, characterizes Shakespeare as a disciple of nature rather than art, untutored, breathing the pure air of inspiration – in Milton's words, ‘Sweetest Shakespeare, fancy's child, /Warbl[ing] his native wood-notes wild’. In the 1605 Quarto of Sejanus, Jonson provides detailed marginal annotations, mostly in Latin, indicating the passages in Tacitus, Suetonius, and other sources he consulted and adapted in writing the play. Shakespeare differed from Jonson and from such writers as Milton, Marvell, Herbert, Crashaw, and Herrick in not being able to read and compose Latin texts as easily as English.
But though Shakespeare left school at the age of fifteen, his education at Stratford grammar school gave him a knowledge of Latin at least equal to that of an A-level student or first-year undergraduate reading Classics today. In the standard curriculum of Shakespeare's day, students were drilled in Latin from the age of seven. Starting with Lily's Latin grammar, memorized by rote in the lower forms, a sixteenth-century grammar-school student would have been exposed to texts of increasing difficulty: Cato's Distiches, Aesop's Fables in a Latin translation, the plays of Terence, and ‘Tullies epistles … Tullies Offices, de Amiticia, Senectute … Ovid's Tristia and Metamorphoses, Virgil’.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011