Description
The essays in this edited collection extend our understanding of the challenges and opportunities that the classical world afforded Shakespeare and his contemporaries. At the same time, they encourage modern scholarship to reevaluate the significance of antiquity in early modern England. Studies of classical heritage often focus on imitation and the transmission of specific classical texts in relation to early modern ones. This volume takes a broader approach, moving away from a notion of antiquity as a series of literary sources toward a notion of antiquity as a body of concepts, formal practices, and innovations for use and adaptation in early modern prose, poetry, and drama. In varied but complementary ways, the essays in this collection interrogate Shakespeare's engagement with the past in relation to his contemporaries as well as his classical models. The collection emphasizes questions of language, temporality, reading and writing, and performance.
Introduction: PART 1: (RE)WRITING THE PAST.- Chapter 1: Male Friendship in Antony and Cleopatra .- Chapter 2: The Shadow of Osiris: Mythic Rivalry in Antony and Cleopatra .- Chapter 3: The stretchéd meter of an antique song : Hearing Classical Time in Shakespeare s Sonnets .- Chapter 4: On Slavery and Comedy of Errors PART 2: THE LANGUAGE OF THE CLASSICS.- Chapter 5: Pathopeia in the Henry VI Plays the Shape of Emotions in Shakespeare s First Style .- Chapter 6: Dissolving Heroism on the English Renaissance stage .- Chapter 7: Caliban s Schoolroom .- PART 3: PERFORMING ANTIQUITY.- Chapter 8: Pompey the Great, a Shakespearean Character Without a Dramatic Part .- Chapter 9: Theatrical Entertainments at Bisham Abbey and Sudeley Castle (1592) .- Chapter 10: Ghosts of the University Stage in Shakespeare s Julius Caesar .- Chapter 11: Aeschylus, Early Modern Tragedy, and the 1518 Agamemnon .- Chapter 12: Allegory, Antiquity, and the Church in The Virgin Martyr .- Chapter 13: The Hammock in Ravenscroft s Titus Andronicus: Indigenous Technology and Roman Historiography on the Restoration Stage .- Chapter 14: "Tempus and Distemperature: Marlowe s Lucan and the Anthropocene".
Heather James is Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Classics at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA. Previous publications include Ovid and the Liberty of Speech in Shakespeare s England (2021) and Shakespeare s Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire (1997, 2000).
Andrew Wallace is Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Carleton University, Canada. Previous publications include Virgil s Schoolboys: The Poetics of Pedagogy in Renaissance England (2010), The Presence of Rome in Early Modern Britain: Texts, Artefacts and Beliefs (2020) and the co-edited collection Taking Exception to the Law: Materializing Injustice in Early Modern English Literature, ed. Donald Beecher, Travis DeCook, Andrew Wallace, and Grant Williams (2015).
