Shakespeare and the Uses of Antiquity

- Charles and Michelle Martindale -

Small Latin
The argument about the extent of Shakespeare’s classical knowledge thus started in his own day and has
continued until ours. To some readers, particularly in the eighteenth century, it seemed that the honor
of England required the demonstration of Shakespeare’s classical learning. To others Shakespeare’s very
lack of it was testimony to his greatness. Often the matter became entangled in the question of the rival
merits of Shakespeare and Jonson and of the superiority of original genius to stale imitation.
A milestone in the history of the debate is Richard Farmer’s Essay on the Learning of Shakespeare (1767),
a brilliant intellectual achievement. He established the principle—still too often ignored—that it is not
enough to point to an apparent similarity between a passage in Shakespeare and one in a classical writer.
It is necessary to know about Elizabethan and Jacobean literature (in which Farmer was remarkably well
versed for the period), possible intermediate vernacular sources, the availability of translations and so
forth. Farmer made one incorrect assumption; that if Shakespeare used a translation he cannot also have
used the original.
Testimony for a more generous view of Shakespeare’s ‘small Latin’ than Farmer’s was eventually supplied
by T.W. Baldwin, by means of a more rigorous and informed application of Farmer’s own methods.
Baldwin’s argument is frequently misunderstood: so J.A.K. Thomson claims that Baldwin only ‘tells us
in very great detail what Shakespeare could have learned at school’. But Baldwin proved his case rather
in the sense that Darwin ‘proved’ evolution. He collected a vast number of tiny data which show that
the classical knowledge displayed in Shakespeare’s plays is exactly what one would expect of someone
who had been to grammar school; of this the most economical explanation is that Shakespeare indeed
attended grammar school, and accordingly learned there a certain amount of Latin, large by twentieth-
century standards, but reasonably described as ‘small’ by the more learned Jonson. Baldwin also
demonstrated that the vocabulary in Shakespeare’s adaptations of Latin material is some-times closer to
the glosses in Cooper’s Thesaurus, the standard Latin dictionary of the period, than to the available
translations, which suggests that Shakespeare had recourse to the original, at least on occasion.
It is worth reflecting briefly on the character of Shakespeare’s education, based largely on the study of
Latin texts. There were obvious limits to Shakespeare’s scholarliness. When he wrote his Roman plays
he used as his basic source an English translation of Plutarch. On the other hand, Shakespeare’s
knowledge of mythology was far greater than that of most university students of Classics today.
if Shakespeare had read all that is proposed for him, he would not have found time to write many plays.
For example, one can cite numerous possible English ‘sources’ for Shakespeare’s mythology, but Ovid is
usually the author whom Shakespeare designs to evoke. In other words, a great deal of the material he
uses is commonplace. In the poems this can be a weakness, but in the plays it does not matter, since
these are mimetic of actions and persons, and most people’s ‘ideas’ and preferences are in fact
commonplaces. He knew some foreign languages, but often preferred to use translations; he did not
necessarily read books all the way through; like all his contemporaries—like most scholars even—he
used short-cuts to knowledge.
Shakespeare again and again dipped casually into other men’s work and turned their dross to gold.
Everyone has their own image of Shakespeare. It would be better if more often it was made explicit.
This, at any rate, is ours
What, in view of the situation we have sketched, do the ideal investigators of Shakespeare’s classicism
need to know? First, obviously, they must be intimate with Shakespeare’s works, and sensitive critics of
them. Secondly, they must be equally familiar with the classics themselves and with the standard
Renaissance editions and commentaries. Thirdly, they must have a full knowledge of Renaissance
literature in both English and Latin. Fourthly, they must be familiar with all the grammar school
material: Lily’s Grammar; Cooper’s Thesaurus, etc.
To conclude, Shakespeare went to grammar school, where he spent a good deal of time, by modern
standards, learning Latin. But he did not proceed to university, and he did not make any private,
systematic study of the ancients in the manner of Ben Jonson. However, his ‘small Latin’ (as Jonson
saw it) would have allowed him to read Latin books, if they were not too difficult, without a translation
where necessary. If he had any Greek, it was quite insufficient to read the great works of archaic and
classical Greece, even had he wanted to do so—but there is no reason to think that he did.
Imitari Is Nothing
supposed that Shakespeare did not directly imitate the ancients. Baldwin has shown that this view is
incorrect. Shakespeare ‘knew thoroughly the fundamentals of composition as they were taught in his
day’, involving him in ‘selecting and recombining materials and models’. This was a typical Renaissance
procedure, even though, in Shakespeare’s case the result was a miracle we cannot explain; the effect of
his ever-changing mastery of language certainly cannot ultimately be accounted for in purely rhetorical
terms. The doctrine of imitation (itself of classical origin) was of course at the heart of much Renaissance
thinking about literature. One learned to write by imitating the ‘best’ authors, that is the most admired
classical writers. Modern scholars often treat imitation primarily as a species of allusion and implying
that knowledge of the original context of any reminiscence is an indispensable component of meaning.
This is misleading, for the traditional metaphors used in discussions of imitation suggest rather creative
assimilation than allusion. The result is a fresh creation deriving from, but independent of, the original.
For Thomas Greene, Renaissance imitation ‘opens a distance, sketches a significant itinerary’ in a way
that combines ‘reverence’ and ‘rebellion’. English literature of the late sixteenth century: in England at
least the main distinction between medieval and Renaissance practice is a different and a simpler one:
where the medieval poet made relaxed use of the original as a mine for material, his Renaissance successor
engaged in more self-conscious stylistic imitation and emulation (this is an argument for treating Chaucer
as medieval, and Spenser as Renaissance). It is partly because of a native classical tradition, which begins
with Chaucer and precedes the humanist flowering of the sixteenth century, that Shakespeare is able to
be so free and relaxed in his use of classical material. For example, in Winter’s Tale IV.iv.27–30, where
Shakespeare elaborates a bald sentence from his source, Greene’s Pandosto (‘Neptune became a ram,
Jupiter a bull, Apollo a shepherd’) into:
Jupiter
Became a bull and bellowed; the green Neptune
A ram and bleated; and the fire-robed god,
Golden Apollo, a poor humble swain,
the combination of bold exuberance and homely wit is a long way from the studied neo-classical manner
of continental humanism. In the remain der of this section we will look at some examples of different
types of imitation in Shakespeare
Imitatio of Classical Loci
Local imitations of brief passages from the Classics are frequently encountered in English Renaissance
literature. They do not prove that the author had read through the whole of the original work, since
anthologies of passages helpful for composition were in widespread use. Ovid was one of Shakespeare’s
favorites, but even so the quotation books could help to jog his memory. The Ovid passage is
characterized by gentle sounds suggesting sleep; by contrast, in the Seneca there is a more powerful
accumulation of appositional phrases which is closer to both the structure and the mood of Shakespeare’s
lines. Shakespeare concentrates, more exclusively than Seneca, on sleep as a healer of men’s troubles,
which he expresses through a series of ostensibly unrelated images, several of them vague or difficult in
expression, and all piled up as passionately high utterances. The speech, interrupted though it is by Lady
Macbeth, has much of the quality of a soliloquy, as Macbeth’s speeches so often do, even when he is not
alone. Although the metaphorical murdering of sleep is obviously connected with the actual murder of
Duncan, it is above all for himself that he is concerned; in the phrase ‘the innocent sleep’, the adjective
glances at the murder of the innocent Duncan, but in a way that is characteristically depersonalized and
generalized. The passage is a fine example of creative imitation as the Renaissance understood it, with
the classical material adapted to its new context and conformed to the character of the speaker.

Shakespeare’s Ovid
Ovid was Shakespeare’s favorite poet, this could be because Ovid is the most accessible of the major
Latin poets for someone with small Latin, but in fact Ovid nourished not only Shakespeare’s imagination
but that of the whole age. We are often presented with an Ovid whose main features are wit and
irreverence, but the Elizabethans also emphasized a vein of pathos, glamour and romance. Thus when
Shakespeare looked at Ovid he could find romance, but not only that; he could also find mastery of
rhetoric, wit, humour, skilful storytelling, a delight in human foibles, an interest in women and love, a
sceptical temper, a refusal to take sides or seriously endorse political ideologies, ‘negative capability’. It
all paints a curiously familiar picture—of Shakespeare himself. Small wonder then that Ovid was his
favourite.
In Shakespeare’s case, however, it does seem that he may have started his career with a deliberate attempt
to present himself as something of an English Ovid. A number of his early plays, from Titus Andronicus
to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, owe a large debt to Ovid, and above all his two narrative poems directly
treat Ovidian subjects. We shall in due course argue that, in certain important respects, the two narratives
are unlike Ovid; it is thus as well to acknowledge at the outset that there may be a gap of perception, or
at least a considerable difference of emphasis, between Elizabethan and modern views of Ovid.
Paradoxically Shakespeare had to get further from Ovid to become more like him, and to achieve a
deftness which is wholly Ovidian in a whole work. The doctrine that all art is about itself holds
widespread sway in the academy. Ovid praises the transforming power of the imagination. It is poets
who create the world of myth, even in a sense, the gods themselves. The Metamorphoses is much more
than a poem about writing poetry, but art and artists are certainly central to it. metamorphosis was
chosen as a theme so unreal that only the poet’s art could give it substance. A number of stories directly
concern artistic creation, Pygmalion for instance.

Pygmalion in The Winter’s Tale

Occasionally Shakespeare uses a story pattern out of Ovid as a basis for a sequence of his own, without
attempting a recognizably Ovidian tone. The most familiar example of the technique occurs in the final
scene of The Winter’s Tale, which is partly patterned on Ovid’s story of Pygmalion (Metamorphoses
X.243–297: the statue does not feature in Pandosto, the main source. In both cases modern readers often
assume that this is the original version of the myth, whereas in fact—in these their classic formulations—
they are creations of the Augustan poets. The story which Ovid remodelled apparently concerned a king
of Cyprus who had sexual intercourse with a statue, an action which perhaps constituted a ‘sacred
marriage’ with the goddess Aphrodite. It was Ovid who made Pygmalion a sculptor and the statue his
creation, eventually brought to life and marriage by Venus. Ovid has retained from his source a strongly
erotic character, which he never quite pushes firmly in the direction of definite sexual perversion. The
description of Pygmalion’s actions as the statue’s lover, suggestive of the world of Roman love elegy (the
winning words; the bringing of gifts, including shells, birds and flowers; the kissing and fondling) is
witty and touching rather than merely salacious.
Like so many Ovidian stories, this one can be taken purely as narrative, or it can be expounded in some
sense which could be called allegorical. Modern readers—influenced in part no doubt by The Winter’s
Tale itself and by the nineteenth-century popularity of the story as a fable about art—normally treat it
as an exploration of the relationship between art and life. Oddly enough readers and commentators in
the Middle Ages and Renaissance seem in general to have taken the story differently. Pygmalion was
seen either as an example of the devoted lover, as he is by the indulgent Gower (Confessio Amantis,
IV.371–450), or as a warning against misplaced passion. Even if the Pygmalion story is taken as a
meditation on life and art, very different interpretations might still be made of it. Shakespeare proves to
be—as we might have suspected—an independent-minded and attentive reader, not a slavish follower of
commentators and traditions. Before the final ‘transformation’ there is an intense and sustained emphasis
on the statue’s apparent status as a work of art. Paulina, it seems, keeps an art ‘gallery’ (the very word
used), in which are displayed ‘many singularities’. The statue is supposedly the work of the Italian master
Giulio Romano, described in the previous scene as Nature’s ‘ape’ (IV.ii.99), and famous for his illusionist
effects. The verisimilitude of the statue, while necessary for Paulina’s plan, must be taken seriously, at
the level of ideas, since it relates to a central preoccupation of Renaissance aesthetics, deriving from
antiquity. Only if such verisimilitude is accepted as a criterion of great art, can the wonder of the
onlookers be kept directed to the statue’s extraordinary beauty; in other words, this view of art is
necessary to the type of illusion, or state of wondering confusion, which Paulina initially seeks to create.
There is also a tension, in the reference to Hermione’s wrinkles, between two potentially conflicting
ideals of Renaissance aesthetics, verisimilitude and idealism. When Leontes observes that the statue
represents an older woman than the Hermione he remembers of sixteen years before, Paulina replies
that this only demonstrates the skills of the artist. This suggests that art can capture important truths
which might not otherwise be observed. In Leontes’ comment ‘The fixure of her eye has motion in’t,/As
we are mocked with art’ (67f.), there is a play on the different senses of ‘fixure’, both colouring or carving
and fixedness, the second meaning providing a paradox with ‘motion’. When Leontes, encouraged by
Paulina, pursues his ‘fancy’ that the statue is alive and appears to breathe, again the presentation focusses
sharply on the language of artistic appreciation, as Shakespeare strains his own art to its highest pitch of
paradox: ‘What fine chisel/Could ever yet cut breath?’ It is remarkable how Shakespeare builds up
tension with variations of ever-increasing complexity on the same basic idea—an idea implicit in Ovid
but not given this degree of emphasis—to prepare for the climax of the statue’s revivification. Whether
he has succeeded or not partly requires the test of the theatre.
The dramaturgy of the scene is in fact unique in Shakespeare. In Ovid the statue actually comes to life—
which determines the character of the story. In Shakespeare Hermione has presumably never died,
although the audience has been misled about the matter and is never given a full account, and the
revivification is stage-managed by Paulina. (It is just possible that Hermione has been in some state of
suspended animation.) The strong sense of resurrection in these scenes does not reside in any sense of
the supernatural, rather it has to do with the psychological impact of the event on those who have passed
the boundary of acceptance that the person concerned is dead. In The Winter’s Tale by contrast, just
possibly to achieve an effect closer to Ovid’s, Shakespeare contrives to make his audience share directly
in the experience of the stage characters without the complications of superior knowledge. Shakespeare
does not attempt a poignancy of writing, instead he relies on the action of Hermione in descending from
the pedestal and on the accompanying music. In this perilous conjuncture of myth and reality, of nature
and miracle, it is required we do awake our faith, so that a pagan mystery can be metamorphosed into
spiritual renewal, in which the gods look down and from their sacred vials pour their graces.
The descent of Hermione has an elemental flavor of myth beyond Ovid’s description of the
metamorphosis of the statue. This is not—or not merely—because of any supposed Christian under-
tones in Shakespeare’s play, since the closest parallel to the effect of the scene—and one which has
indeed been claimed as a direct source. Rather it could be said to illustrate Shakespeare’s ability to discern,
behind the generally commonplace romance materials he was directly using, the possibilities of patterns
of actions and emotion which had in fact resided in the great poetry of classical Greece which he had
never read So too on occasion he was able to use Ovid’s sophisticated literariness as a gateway to a
different and more elemental treatment of myth.

Myths out of Ovid

Shakespeare’s most obvious debt to Ovid—and, to a lesser extent, to Virgil—is the whole system of
Graeco-Roman mythology to which he had constant recourse throughout his career R.K.Root—whose
study of the subject, published in 1903, still remains the standard work—argues, in a way which derives
from Victorian assumptions about Shakespeare’s ‘development’, that there are three phases in
Shakespeare’s use of mythology. In the early plays allusions are marked by their graceful charm. In the
second phase, beginning with As You Like It, they either become more playful and satiric, or are used
very sparingly, especially in the great tragedies. In the final group of plays mythology is revived, but with
‘deeper’ meanings predominating, and a stress on divinity, nature myth, and ‘types of qualities, physical
or moral’. Root’s explanation of the shifts, however, is quite implausible. It rests on the assumption that
Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a trivial work, without ‘spiritual significance’. There is absolutely no reason to
suppose that Shakespeare ever lost his taste for Ovid, or that the shifting use of mythological material in
his plays can be related to changes in his estimation of the Metamorphoses. A more plausible explanation
lies in changes of taste and fashion among audiences, for which Shakespeare always had keen antennae.
Also significant is the question of the dominant character of a particular play, together with the essential
matter of its decorum. If there are only five mythological allusions in Julius Caesar, that is because
Shakespeare is creating a relatively unadorned style of dignified public utterance suited to Roman
politicians (Cicero, as Shakespeare would presumably know, avoids mythology and excessive learning in
his speeches).
Ovid is a major—and neglected—source for Troilus, and Shakespeare remains a pupil of Ovid
(the heir of Euripides) in his scepticism, modernization of legend, and nuanced attitude to the heroic;
but in general the style, or rather the styles, would probably not strike a Jacobean audience as Ovidian.
PROSERPINA, THE WINTER’S TALE (1611), IV.iv.112–125
Now, my fairest friend,
I would I had some flowers of the spring, that might
Become your time of day; and yours, and yours,
That wear upon your virgin branches yet
Your maidenheads growing; o Proserpina,
For the flowers now, that, frighted, thou let’st fall
From Dis’ waggon! Daffodils,
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty, violets dim
But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes
Or Cytherea’s breath, pale primroses
That die unmarried ere they can behold
Bright Phoebus in his strength—a malady
Most incident to maids…
Our final passage sees the full restoration of Shakespeare’s earlier more lyrical manner, but at a much
higher level of poetic sophistication. The story of Proserpina comes from Ovid (Metamorphoses V).
although in this case we cannot tell whether Shakespeare was remembering the Latin or Golding’s
translation. The allusion is a particularly apt one, since this is a play controlled by the rhythm of death
and rebirth and the story of Proserpina was frequently interpreted, in a ‘physical’ sense, as concerning
the cycle of the year’s changes. In Ovid Proserpina’s plucking of the flowers prepares for the loss of her
virginity—as Milton, remembering this passage, puts it, ‘herself a fairer flower by gloomy Dis/Was
gathered’ (Paradise Lost, IV.270f.) Female sexuality is indeed something Perdita’s language keeps
touching on. Thus the opening lines fuse the virginity of her companions with natural growth in a
somewhat surreal metaphor. Phoebus is not merely the sun, but a masculine deity representing all that
fruition which the maids with their ‘green sickness’ will never experience. The pale primroses, which
possess the precarious attraction of flowers which appear at the verge of winter, are personified as maids
in that they die unmarried in early spring before the sun reaches its full potency. The sadness is focused
on the primroses, since the parenthesis about the maids and their green sickness seems touched with a
gentle humor, but the pathos of early death and unfulfilled womanhood flickers through this whole
section. The goddesses also carry some erotic charge: Venus, whose breath fuses with the scent of flowers,
is the goddess of love, and the phrase ‘the lids of Juno’s eyes’, while suggesting the nodding, face-like
flower, shyly or coyly hidden, also gives a mildly erotic impression of the goddess’ eyes. The Violets dim’
recall Virgil’s pallentes, violas (Eclogue II.47)—appropriately in this pastoral setting—where the ancient
commentators saw a reference to the pallor of lovers. The daffodils, with their temerity and attractiveness
to the winds, are again presented as animated nature, and animated along the erotic lines of the love-
sick winds and waves surrounding Cleopatra’s barge. The world of flowers is thus inter-twined with
human emotions and a divine world of gods immanent in nature, where violets imply the heady
attractiveness of classical goddesses and primroses inspire sad thoughts (flecked with wit) about those
who fail to encounter the full force of the sun as a sort of cosmic bridegroom. Perdita is depicting such
a world as is glimpsed some-times in Antony and Cleopatra, one which links divine forces, natural
energies and human beings, a world depicted with great power, but not without a touch of skepticism
and irony. The verse is as accomplished as anything Shakespeare ever wrote, and the passage shows to
what pitch Ovidian mythology could fire his imagination. Without Ovid, Shakespeare’s plays (as English
literature generally) would have been very different, and very greatly impoverished.