It’s the 400th anniversary this week of the posthumous publication of the ‘First Folio’, in November 1623, so a good moment to venture something about Shakespeare. Within the gigantic Shakespeare industry, there’s a sizable sub-field on Shakespeare and “classical reception”, his use of the (Latin & Greek) classics, especially Ovid. Shakespeare plainly knew many of the stories which appear in Ovid’s Metamorphoses — most of which were pretty ubiquitous cultural references at the time — and knew something about Ovid as a writer; he was obviously interested in the ancient world, and set several of his plays (like Julius Caesar and Anthony and Cleopatra) in it. All the same there’s something a bit “wood for trees” about the whole “Shakespeare and the classics” field because it’s equally obvious that Shakespeare isn’t a “classical” author in most senses of the word. I mean that compared with other writers of his time there is little in Shakespeare that seems influenced directly, or to be imitating directly, the style, form or genres of the core classical texts as we know them today. He writes in a very different way. That’s not to say, of course, that it’s not interesting to see what he does with the classical stories, themes and forms that came his way. But his “unclassicism” is quite marked especially if you start reading around him and comparing his work to close contemporaries like Ben Jonson or Christopher Marlowe in England, or François de Malherbe (whom I’ve written about here) in France. This can make detailed discussion of Shakespeare in relation to specific classical authors feel like academic pedantry: work that might be interesting in itself, but which somehow misses the point of what it’s like to read Shakespeare, and doesn’t often help us to read him better.
But early modern Latinity is not the same thing as classical reception or imitation; in fact, the vast majority of early modern Latin isn’t classical at all — I mean both that the huge majority of the Latin read and written in Shakespeare’s time was not ancient, and nor was it written in typically ‘classical’ styles or forms. Shakespeare certainly read (and spoke and wrote) a lot of Latin at school and he very probably continued to read a good deal of Latin not only as a schoolboy but also as an adult. But his knowledge and use of Latin is not the same thing as his knowledge and use of “the classics”. What difference might it make if we thought about Shakespeare in relation to non-classical Latinity?
Children learning Latin in Elizabethan England, as Shakespeare certainly did, didn’t start with “classical” Latin at all. They started with what was taken at the time to be the most important thing — Latin prayers, statements of faith and pieces of scripture, often versified for ease of memorization. The first set texts of continuous ‘original’ prose — that is, not works written specifically for school use — were scriptural, both in Latin at the start of a grammar school education, and again a few years later when boys added Greek.1 Latin was taught orally and the grammar school classroom, whatever the subject, was a Latin medium classroom: so also, from the very beginning, boys learnt basic spoken phrases. Here is a Scottish schoolboy using the back of his textbook of Latin grammar to note down some key spoken phrases. The book was published in Edinburgh in 1566 and though this first set of manuscript additions is undated, a following section in the same hand is dated 1571. To be making notes of this very basic kind, the boy must have been at the very beginning of his grammar school education, probably aged 8 or 9. Shakespeare, born in 1564, was 7 in 1571.
The image is hard to read, but you might be able to make out the second Latin-Scots pair on the left-hand side, which says Cedo mihi doctrinam / Gif me ane kennyng (that is, ‘Give me a lesson’). (The larger handwriting of each pair is the Latin, the smaller script beneath it in Scots.) I’m also amused by the the fourth pair Dicam preceptori / I sell [= shall] tell the mayster. I think this is meant as ‘I shall reply to the teacher’ but it does sound a bit like the Latin for ‘if you do that again, I’m going to put my hand up and tell on you’.
The core texts of the first year or two aimed to teach the rudiments of Latin (for speaking, reading and writing) with the core pedagogical aims of religio-moral education, reading comprehension and oral competence always in mind. As a result, the first set texts were short moralising verses or sententiae, and dialogues, little mini-plays — starting very simply and increasing in sophistication. The best of these, including very widely used pieces by authors like Castellio, Cordier and Erasmus, are fine pieces of drama and characterisation in their own right. When Theseus and Hermia debate the pros and cons of marriage for women at the start of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Theseus quotes from a very famous dialogue by Erasmus on marriage, Proci et puellae (‘The young men and the girls’). There has been quite a lot of work tracing links between Shakespeare and Roman drama, both Senecan tragedy and Roman comedy, but almost none on these foundational experiences of drama or at least quasi-drama in the ubiquitous school dialogues.2
Alongside dialogues, boys studied and memorised the rules (especially the versified rules) from their grammars: when the boy William quotes Lily’s grammar in The Merry Wives of Windsor, he’s actually quoting the verse summaries. They also read and memorised collections of short epigrams and other sententiae, selected for their moral rectitude as well as linguistic simplicity. By far the most widespread of these was the curious late antique text, now entirely forgotten by classicists, called Cato’s Distichs (though certainly not, in fact, by Cato). This was often printed alongside one or more other sets of moralising precepts. The schoolmaster might also make use of collections of extracts for school use, such as the Sententiae Pueriles, a hodge-podge of improving quotations from classical, Christian and more recent sources. Indeed, the schoolboy who annotated his 1570s grammar with the phrases pictured above, went on to add in the back transcriptions of several texts of this kind, including Cato’s Distichs. Anyone familiar with modern annotated editions of Shakespeare will recall how often a proverbial expression is annotated with a reference to a dictionary of English proverbs: but Elizabethan schoolboys, if they encountered such vernacular proverbial expressions in print at all (rather than in speech), did so most often as glosses or translations of the equivalent Latin expressions, which formed such a significant part of early Latin instruction.
Aside from scripture, the first continuous prose boys tackled was very often a Latin edition of Aesop’s fables. Many of the surviving school editions are heavily annotated, especially so for the first section of shorter fables, which were often read painfully slowly. It is noticeable that several of the stories from Aesop to which Shakespeare alludes most often — such as the countryman and the snake — are both found early on in the standard late sixteenth-century Latin editions of Aesop. That is: the parts of such volumes read most slowly and painstakingly, as children picked their way through the Latin. A large number of Latin verse paraphrases of these stories also survive: evidently this was a very common exercise, encouraging students to revisit the pieces of Latin prose they knew best as they began to learn how to compose Latin poetry. The image below is an example of a late sixteenth-century schoolboy’s verse paraphrase of ‘the countryman and the snake’, which is the seventh story in most contemporary editions of Aesop:
The next year or so of reading — somewhere around the third of fourth year of grammar school, depending on the particular school — typically continued to focus on non-classical texts.3 Two of the most commonly read school works in early modern England were the Adulescentia of Mantuan (that is, Baptista Spagnuoli, 1448-1516), a set of pastoral poems imitative of Virgil but conveniently hostile to the papacy, written by a Carmelite at the end of the fifteenth century; and Palingenius’ Zodiacus Vitae, an astonishing didactic epic in twelve books. Palingenius, too, is a somewhat shadowy figure from early sixteenth-century Italy, and he is likewise conscious of his classical models: the Zodiacus, like the Aeneid, is in twelve books which divide into two sets of six. Palingenius’ style, though, is nothing like Virgil at all, and in his focus on the spiritual, intellectual and moral transformation of the individual soul he is also taking aim directly at Ovid’s Metamorphoses, of which he strongly disapproves. The Zodiacus Vitae was proscribed by the Catholic Church in 1558, no doubt significantly contributing to its popularity in Protestant countries.
Shakespeare’s Holofernes quotes Mantuan with affection in Love’s Labours Lost (IV.2), and the famous speech on how ‘All the world’s a stage’ in As You Like It II.vii has long been noted by scholars to derive from Book 6 of the Zodiacus Vitae. (In fact, as is not usually noted, this is an image Palingenius used repeatedly, not just once.) Extracts of both Mantuan and Palingenius are found extremely frequently in schoolboys’ notebooks and commonplace books, and still very often also in student and adult collections, often together, and almost always in Latin rather than translation, demonstrating both how very frequently they were read, and how often they sank deep into the memory of those who had studied them.
Both the Zodiacus and the Adulscentia are written in very readable Latin, in a style which is much more immediately accessible for a native English speaker than Virgil or even most of Ovid. Both are also highly excerptable, packed with gnomic remarks and vivid comparisons. Both, too, have a rich vein of sincere social satire: this is something we don’t find at all in Virgil; while Ovid, though often wittily cynical, rarely seems sincere about wishing for improvement. The moral seriousness animating these works was no doubt central to their popularity as schooltexts. Here is a typical example of manuscript quotations from Palingenius — nearly two full pages of flores here (i.e. quotable best bits) following just a few lines from Lucan. You should be able to make out Ex Lucano (‘from Lucan’) near the top of the first page and Ex Palingeno a little farther down:
Palingenius, in particular, has suffered from a particularly disastrous kind of critical oblivion, being not only largely forgotten but also, when he is mentioned at all, almost always horribly misrepresented. The typical description — which ones finds repeated almost verbatim in a series of works of scholarship — is of a ‘verse compendium of astronomical, moral and philosophical thought’, which sounds deadly dull.4 I fear whoever first came up with this summary had not really read Palingenius, and that none of the others who have repeated it have either. The Zodiacus Vitae certainly contains a wide range of material, but it’s an epic poem, of a distinctively personal kind: via a series of visions and encounters with individuals (like Epicurus) and allegorical personifications (such as Death and Virtue) the poet-protagonist pursues his quest to understand the life of man and (in the second half) the glory of the universe.
Though discursive and sometimes repetitious, it offers a powerfully coherent vision of the grandeur and glory of creation and of all its inhabitants (including angels, a particular interest), and a markedly positive declaration of the possibility of human contact with the divine. Many sections are both moving and exciting, and it is both deeply religious and strangely barely Christian: suffused with awe at the wonder and variety of creation, it nevertheless hardly mentions Christ at all. For a taste, here is a passage from the end of Book 4, in which a character called Timalphes, the son of Arete (that is, personified virtue), takes leave of the poet in order to return to heaven, and describes his view of the earth from above:
Nunc tempus remeare monet locaque infima mundiDeserere et supera voitando reuisere sedes,Vnde ego tellurem soleo spectare frequenter,Admirans adeo paruam minimamque videri,Exiguique instar pomi pendere rotundamAëris in medio, fultam molimine nullo,Atque suo tantum libratam pondere; cernoInde etiam Oceanum totas circundare terras,Perque ipsas flexo, velut anguis, serpere cursuNerea coeruleum, modici sub imagine riui.Now the time warns me to return, to abandon the lower regionsOf the world, and to regain by flight the upper realm:From there I often look down upon the earth,Wondering at how very tiny it seems,Like the sphere of a small apple hangingIn the midst of the air, with no structure holding it up,And balanced only by its own weight; I seeFrom that vantage point also the Ocean encircling all the lands:How, like a snake, it creeps around them in a curve,Blue-green Nereus, like a small river.
Shakespeare, though fascinated by classical myth and history, is not a particularly classical author. But if he completed four or five years at a grammar school, but not more — which is quite likely though of course not certain — then most of the Latin he had read was not classical either. When we think about Shakespeare’s influences, perhaps we should focus less on Virgil, Ovid and Seneca, and more on unclassical Latin.
By the end of the sixteenth century, many English grammar schools were also teaching a little Hebrew in the final year or two. Modern languages were not usually taught. Shakespeare probably left school at a point at which he had studied some Greek, but not a great deal. If he had done just a year or two of Greek, he is likely to have read a Greek grammar with explanations in Latin, some simple starter texts like Greek versions of Aesop and Cato, and some of the Greek New Testament.
Work on the Elizabethan school curriculum has been hampered by the fact that the foundational text in this field, Baldwin’s huge, two-volume William Shakespere’s Small Latine and Less Greek (available online here if you want to explore it) is both incredibly detailed and also very difficult to navigate. A much more readable synthesis can be found in Ian Green, Humanism and Protestantism in Early Modern English Education (Ashgate, 2009), though Green is best on the seventeenth-century. Neither Baldwin nor Green, however, looked much at manuscript sources. Thousands of examples of early modern English school work survive, which offer a great deal of further detail about the texts that were used, how they were taught and the kind of exercises children were asked to complete in response to them. My database of early modern schoolwork in manuscript currently contains information on 91 manuscripts, some of them running to hundreds of pages.
Different schools had different numbers of pupils and available masters to teach them, so divided the boys into various numbers of classes, usually between five and seven.
This example from Gillespie, Shakespeare’s Books, 326 is typical. The classicist Yasmin Haskell, in a series of chapters and articles, has for many years been the only Anglophone scholar to pay serious attention to Palingenius and to his cultural context, though her focus is on his contemporary Italian context and his use of classical texts, not on how his work was read and used in the Northern European classroom. (He was, if anything, even more popular in France.) For a fuller description of the Zodiacus and a discussion of Palingenius’ influence upon early modern English literature, see Chapter 11 (‘Palingenian Epic’) in my recent Literary History of Latin and English Poetry.