Details

ISBN-10: 0691210144
ISBN-13: 9780691210148
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Publish Date: 10/13/2020
Dimensions: 8.50" L, 5.50" W, 1.10" H

How the Classics Made Shakespeare

Paperback

Price: $18.95

Overview

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 that combines stylistic brilliance, accessibility, and 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.

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Reviews
"Jonathan Bate's How the Classics Made Shakespeare is the fruit of wide reading, rich learning, and a lifetime of singularly intelligent reflection on the playwright and his sources. Bate's fresh insights into even the most familiar of plays amply justifies his claim that Shakespeare's imagination had its birth in his Latin lessons in the Stratford-upon-Avon schoolroom and that throughout his career he turned for inspiration to the heritage of Greece and Rome."–Stephen Greenblatt, author of Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare
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Details

ISBN-10: 0691210144
ISBN-13: 9780691210148
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Publish Date: 10/13/2020
Dimensions: 8.50" L, 5.50" W, 1.10" H
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