Shakespeare and Greece

This book seeks to invert Ben Jonsons claim that Shakespeare had small Latin and less Greek and to prove that, in fact, there is more Greek and less Latin in a significant group of Shakespeares texts: a group whose generic hybridity (tragic-comical-historical-romance) exemplifies the hybridity of Greece in the early modern imagination. To early modern England, Greece was an enigma. It was the origin and idealised pinnacle of Western philosophy, tragedy, democracy, heroic human endeavour and, at the same time, an example of decadence: a fallen state, currently under Ottoman control, and therefore an exotic, dangerous, Other in the most disturbing senses of the word. Indeed, while Britain was struggling to establish itself as a nation state and an imperial authority by emulating classical Greek models, this ambition was radically unsettled by early modern Greeces subjection to the Ottoman Empire, which rendered Europes eastern borders dramatically vulnerable. Focusing, for the first time, on Shakespeares Greek texts (Venus and Adonis, The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Nights Dream, Love's Labours Lost, Troilus and Cressida, Timon of Athens, King Lear, Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen), the volume considers how Shakespeares use of antiquity and Greek myth intersects with early modern perceptions of the country and its empire.