Reading Shakespeare and the Classics. A Post-graduate Seminar

Today a thriving area of research interest, the relationship between Shakespeare and the classics has aroused mixed feelings in the past. While never denying the indebtedness to the cultural and literary heritage of classical Rome and Greece, scholarship has long tended to present English drama as substantially free from the auctoritas of classical antiquity, and stress Shakespeare’s individual and original voice. This book grew from a Comparative Literature postgraduate seminar held at the Department of Studi Umanistici of the University of Torino, and devoted to recent studies in classical reception. The focus was Shakespeare’s reception of the Greek and Latin culture. Basing the work on the essays by Charles Martindale and A. B. Taylor (Shakespeare and the Classics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004), and by Jonathan Bate (Shakespeare and Ovid, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1993; How the Classics Made Shakespeare, Princeton and Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2019), a group of young scholars explored how the various patterns of the classical world influenced Shakespeare’s thought, imagery and style, and his sense of performance. Resulting from a varied set of relationships, therefore, Shakespeare’s response to the classics testifies to a life-long engagement, which has certainly contributed to making his literary output stand out as multi-layered and open to different interpretations, just as the contributions collected in this volume show.