Shakespeare and the Uses of Antiquity: An Introductory Essay

249 Pages·1994·1.53 MB·English

by  Charles Martindale

SHAKESPEARE AND
THE USES OF
ANTIQUITY
An Introductory Essay
Charles and Michelle Martindale
London and New York
First published 1990
First published in paperback 1994
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of
thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
© 1990, 1994 Charles and Michelle Martindale
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, not known or hereafter
invented, including photcopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Martindale, Charles
Shakespeare and the Uses of Antiquity:
Introductory Essay.—New ed
I. Title II. Matindale, Michelle
822. 3′3
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Martindale, Charles.
Shakespeare and the uses of antiquity: an introductory essay on
Shakespeare and English Renaissance classicism/Charles and Michelle Martindale.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Knowledge—Literature. 2. Shakespeare,
William, 1564–1616—Knowledge—Rome. 3. Rome in literature. 4. Civilization,
Classical, in literature. 5. Mythology, Classical, in literature.
6. Classicism—England—History–16th century. 7. Shakespeare, William,
1564–1616—Knowledge and learning.
I. Martindale, Michelle, 1951—. II. Title.
PR3037.M37 1990 89–71346 822.3′3–dc20 CIP
ISBN 0-203-98603-2 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0415- 104- 262 (Print Edition)
For Gabriel and
Benjamin
pignora
It has always been admitted by competent opinion that Shakspere’s
education was a ‘trivial’ one. But exactly because it was a trivial one it
was perhaps best adapted to the doing of trivial things—such as writing
immortal plays.
(Baldwin, vol. 2, p. 674)
CONTENTS
Preface vii
Acknowledgements xii
1 INTRODUCTION 1
Small Latin 1
Imitari is nothing 11
Seneca by candlelight 29
2 SHAKESPEARE’S OVID 45
Philomela in Titus and Cymbeline 47
Ovidian narrative 56
Ovid in fairyland 64
Pygmalion in The Winter’s Tale 76
Myths out of Ovid 81
3 SHAKESPEARE’S TROY 91
Shakespeare’s Iliad? 91
Homeric traces in Troilus and Cressida 98
Shakespeare’s Trojan style 115
4 SHAKESPEARE’S ROME 121
The uses of anachronism 121
Shakespeare’s and other Romes 125
More an Antique Roman 141
In search of a Roman style 154
vi
5 SHAKESPEARE’S STOICISM 165
Constancy in the Renaissance 168
Shakespeare and the constant (wo)man 173
Abbreviations used in notes 189
Notes 191
Selected Bibliography 221
Index 225
Index of Passages 231
PREFACE
The issues which most concern many Shakespearean scholars today are
those raised by post-structuralism, cultural materialism or the new
historicism, feminism and so forth. In other words Shakespeare is being
used—as he has always been used—as cultural currency in our battles for
meaning and self-understanding. But interesting, and modish, as these
concerns are, there are other approaches which have the advantage of
being closer to those of Shakespeare himself and of his original audiences.
Shakespeare, though not a learned man, wrote in an age saturated with
matters classical. To the Elizabethans education meant essentially the
study of Latin; inevitably as a result much that was written and thought
was dominated by the classical tradition. One third of Shakespeare’s plays
are set in the ancient world, and he has constant recourse to classical
mythology and history, and to classical ideas. This is simply a matter of
record. That so narrow an education must have been a disaster will be
agreed by all; the only problem is that it provoked one of the two or three
richest flowerings in the history of Western literature.
This study is not designed primarily to provide an account of
Shakespeare’s classical sources. Those who require extended details of
echoes and borrowings must read Baldwin and others. We rather aim, in
certain specific areas, to follow up the critical implications of our present
knowledge of Shakespeare’s classicism. Baldwin argues that his enquiries
into the compositional methods of Renaissance poets have no such
implications: ‘the result cannot possibly make a line of their poetry…
either more or less great. It can merely throw interesting and important
light on how they attained their results. On literary appreciation itself
such matters have little or no direct bearing’ (vol.2, p.453). Admittedly
to say that ‘dusky Dis’ (Tempest IV.i.89) is Ovid’s niger Dis (Met. IV.438)
tells us nothing very exciting; but to see that the masque evokes an
Ovidian world but in a curiously artificial style, and to link this with
viii
Prospero’s dismissal of his art, is to move from source hunting
to criticism.
We write on the assumption that the modern student requires
something more sophisticated than J.A.K.Thomson’s spirited but
cheerfully philistine little book Shakespeare and the Classics with its
no-nonsense neo-Farmerian thesis. Our aim is not to be novel, but to put
the position as we see it (even if that position sounds old-fashioned).
Whether there is anything both new and productive in our readings of
Shakespeare, others more expert must be the judge. Since the steady
professionalizing of English studies, there has been a flood of publications
on most subjects and especially on Shakespeare: there are 2,487 items
listed in Velz’s Shakespeare and the Classical Tradition alone. No one, even if
she or he wanted, could now read all that has been written on him.
Wishing to retain our sanity, we had neither the time nor the inclination
to do more than dip our feet into the water. One of us is a lecturer in
Classics, the other a teacher of English at a school; neither is part of the
world of professional Shakespearean scholarship.
We nevertheless hope to bring a fresh perspective. Most of those who
write about Shakespeare assume—such is his cultural authority—that he
is at all times necessarily superior to the classical poets he used. This is
not always the case, and we have not been afraid to say so. For example,
none of Shakespeare’s early Ovidian works, not even the Dream, equals
the quality of Ovid’s Metamorphoses’, Shakespeare matched Ovid in one
scene in Cymbeline, and surpassed him in a speech in The Tempest.
And although he read at least some of the Aeneid, and echoed it, his poetic
encounter with Virgil was not a profoundly productive one, in contrast to
Dante’s or Milton’s.
This book is not designed as a comprehensive treatment of
Shakespeare’s classicism. There is no systematic account of Shakespeare’s
use of classical rhetoric, although there is much in these pages that bears
on the subject. The reason is partly tactical: the general modern distaste
for rhetoric, at least in its traditional form (despite the sterling work of
scholars like Brian Vickers), makes an oblique approach advisable. (In fact
much fashionable critical theory is best regarded as a new rhetoric, and
one quite as technical and pedantic as its predecessor.) There are
numerous other omissions both great and small. The most substantial is
any account of romance forms. Romance had its origins in antiquity, but
few ancient critics would have taken the Greek prose romances seriously
as literature, while Greek works which moderns might regard as
romances—the Odyssey, for example, or Euripides’ Alcestis and Ion—were
assigned to other genres. The importance of romance as part of high
ix
literary culture is thus largely a post-classical phenomenon, part of the
story of the Middle Ages and of the vernaculars, not of the classical
tradition more narrowly defined. (Significantly, in the Renaissance
Heliodorus’ Aethiopica was read as a kind of prose epic.) In any case
treatment of Shakespearean romance, which would involve lengthy
consideration of vernacular developments, would require another book as
large as this one and quite a different sort of expertise. We might have
included a chapter on Shakespeare’s Greece, with Timon of Athens as the
main illustrative text; but Timon is not studied in schools and hardly in
universities, while what we would wish to say on this subject is mostly
implied in our account of Troilus and Cressida, a greater and currently
more popular play. Above all we have chosen to write about matters
which particularly interest us.
In the introductory chapter we look at three long-discussed issues: the
extent of Shakespeare’s classical knowledge, the doctrine of imitation,
and the influence of Seneca on English Renaissance drama; we resist the
modern tendency both to exaggerate Shakespeare’s learning and to
downgrade the importance of Seneca. In chapter 2 we explore the world
of classical mythology, which Shakespeare utilized throughout his career,
and which was the subject of his favourite classical book, Ovid’s
Metamorphoses. Chapter 3 deals with the world of Troy which Shakespeare
recreated from a variety of ancient, medieval and Renaissance sources;
we argue for the greater importance of Chapman’s Seven Books from the
Iliad, and the notion of classical epic style embodied therein, than is
usually allowed. In chapter 4 we look at Shakespeare’s presentation of the
Roman world, and we suggest that Shakespeare’s reading of Plutarch in
North’s translation enabled him to create a more persuasive image of
Rome than that found in other plays of the period. However, we make no
attempt to offer detailed interpretations of the three Roman plays; and
we do not discuss, in any systematic way, Shakespeare’s adaptation of
North. In chapter 5 we illustrate Shakespeare’s use of ancient moral ideas
by examining the role of the Stoic virtue of constancy in a number of
plays; a pagan moral world provides a context for understanding, and
responding to, a number of key scenes and speeches.
Here it is important to issue a caveat which applies to this book as a
whole. All critical methods are necessarily partial, and this is a particular
problem when one is dealing with a writer as protean as Shakespeare.
We would not claim that our approach is better than any other, still less
that it affords the only frame of reference for discussing his works.
Thus there is no sense in which Stoicism provides a uniquely authoritative
focus for responses to particular plays. All we claim is that on occasion