3. "Smalle Latin and Lesse Greek"?

On William Shakespeare's Classical Knowledge

The Elizabethan world thrummed to the sound of the classics. At every grammar school in the country, boys would be set to learning Latin, from Lily’s Latin Grammar (a book used for centuries, written by the playwright John Lyly’s grandfather), before moving on to Ovid and Terence at the age of about 13: authors who, in their subject matter and relative grammatical straightforwardness, are more appealing to adolescents, perhaps, than the knottier authors they would study later such as Livy and Vergil.

And boy, were they steeped in it. They would have to learn Latin passages off by heart; they would be made to write in imitation of the authors they learnt. It is pleasing to note, however, that even despite all this, they still made mistakes: Christopher Marlowe in his translation of Ovid makes an absolute howler, if you’ll excuse the pun, as follows:

‘Plena venit canis de grege praeda lupis’.

He translates it as ‘From dog-kept flocks come preys to wolves most grateful’. Where he got the “most grateful” from I have no idea. Worse is his translation of “canis” as a form of the noun meaning “dog”; in fact, it’s from ‘canus’, meaning ‘hoary’, and is ablative plural, going with ‘lupis’. Well I can imagine a schoolmaster saying, ‘Where’s the nominative, boy?’ It is in fact “praeda’, and agreeing with it is ‘plena’ - ‘A full prize’. The verb is ‘venit’, so ‘a full prize comes’, and then we fill in the rest - ‘de grege’, ‘from the flock’, and ‘canis lupis’, ‘to the hoary wolves.’

“Smalle Latin and Lesse Greek” is a phrase that people associate with William Shakespeare, and it’s usually taken to mean that the playwright was ill-educated. But there are three important things to note here. The first is that, as we can see from the university-educated Marlowe, even he could get it wrong.

The second is that it was Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s rival and friend, who said it. Jonson had been educated at Westminster, and he was a fully boned-up classicist. You can see this in his choice of subject matter: I can’t imagine that many people have read his Sejanus, an account of the fall of Tiberius’ favourite, or his Catiline, about an ill-fated revolt in Rome (I have, but not since I was an undergrad); still fewer, I imagine, have spent time with his lovely Poetaster, which features the Augustan poets Virgil, Ovid and Tibullus. From Ben Jonson’s point of view, anyone else had small Latin and less Greek.

The third thing is that we can assume (with very high probability) that William Shakespeare attended the local grammar school, where his father would have been involved, and where his education would have been for free. When you look at Will’s early plays, you can see how steeped they are in Ovid and Terence - in other words, in the authors he would have read at school. If he left school at the age of thirteen or fourteen (again, highly probable), in order to be an apprentice (either a butcher or a glover, in all probability), then he would still have been steeped in these authors.

Titus Andronicus is a juvenile mishmash of these influences, blending Ovid, Terence and Seneca in a weird, wild invention that someone like Ben Jonson, with his focus on a more austere classicism, would never have countenanced. (Nor, incidentally, would Christopher Marlowe, whose Dido Queen of Carthage, though replete with invention, is much closer to its source material in Virgil than Shakespeare ever was.) And The Comedy of Errors is a straightforward riff on Plautus’ Menaechmi. His early poems, Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, both have sources in Ovid; he would also have accessed Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid, which his Stratford friend Richard Field sold in his London shop. (And if you’re interested in Shakespearean sources, have a look at David Kathman’s piece on the books Field printed.)

In other words, William Shakespeare, as a grammar-school educated boy, would have had a serious grasp on a large slice of Latin literature, and would have continued his reading of it as he moved through the theatrical world seeking for sources. His command of the classics was probably better than that of most undergraduates today, even at the great universities. Once more, all you need to do to understand this is read his plays, and read them alongside those of his contemporaries.

Reading Matters

Since the start of the year, I’ve read a collection of short stories by Pippa Goldschmidt, Schödinger’s Wife, my review of which came out in the Times Literary Supplement this week.

Lean Cowen Orlin’s The Private Life of William Shakespeare is a wonderful book which re-evaluates the documentary evidence around the poet, and is well worth reading by anyone with a modicum of interest in the subject.

I’ve also reviewed How to Talk about Love, a translation by Armand d’Angour of selections from Plato, for The Spectator.

I’m currently reading Park Honan’s biography of Christopher Marlowe, which is astonishingly good, vivid and well-written; and James Shapiro’s 1599, which looks at a year in Shakespeare’s life.

Book News

I visited St Mary’s Ascot, to talk about classics, codes and language, and also Leigh Stationers’ Primary Academy, to talk about myths and legends in The Double Axe and The Arrow of Apollo.