A Century of Scholarly Neglect: Shakespeare and Greek Drama

Abstract

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a number of Shakespeare scholars, including Israel Gollancz (1894), H.R.D. Anders (1904), J. Churton Collins (1904), and Gilbert Murray (1914) wrote convincingly of Shakespeare’s debt to classical Greek drama. However, in the century since, most scholars and editors have repeatedly held that Shakespeare was not familiar with Greek drama. In Classical Mythology in Shakespeare (1903), Robert Kilburn Root expressed the opinion on Shakespeare’s ‘lesse Greek’ that presaged this enduring dismissal: “It is at any rate certain that he nowhere alludes to any characters or episodes of Greek drama, that they extended no influence whatsoever on his conception of mythology.” (p. 6)   This century-long consensus against Attic dramatic influence was reinforced by A.D. Nutall, who wrote, “that Shakespeare was cut off from Greek poetry and drama is probably a bleak truth that we should accept.” (Nutall, 2004, p.210) Scholars have preferred to maintain that Plutarch or Ovid were Shakespeare’s surrogate literary mediators for the playwright’s adaptations from Greek myth and theatre. Other scholars, however, have questioned these assumptions, including Laurie Maguire, who observed that “invoking Shakespeare’s imagined conversations in the Mermaid tavern is not a methodology likely to convince skeptics that Shakespeare knew Greek drama.” (p. 98) This near-universal rejection of Greek drama as Shakespeare sources have profound philological implications. Indeed, this essay argues that the proscription against recognizing the Attic canon as an influence in Shakespeare has been driven by the belief that Will Shakspere of Stratford had, at most, an education that was Latin-based. The examples show that the real author had to have been exposed to both the Greek language and the Greek dramatists. Evidence for alternative candidates, including Edward de Vere, shows that many were schooled in Greek and that some even collected and supported translations of Greek works. It is my contention that Shakespeare’s dramatic imagination was actually fired by the Greeks, and Shakespeare research has clearly suffered from a century of denial.