Who Art Thou, Shakespeare?

Who Art Thou, Shakespeare?

(Princeton University Press)
In “How the Classics Made Shakespeare,” Jonathan Bate — provost of Worcester College, Oxford, as well as a scholar of remarkable industry — probes what one might call the Ovidian, Virgilian, Horatian, Ciceronian, Plutarchan and Senecan undergirdings to the many Shakespearean works with strong classical associations. Bate begins with a simple premise: “Storytelling was Shakespeare’s method of making sense of the world, and no stories gripped him more fully than those of classical antiquity.” Erotic obsession, madness, pagan “fame” vs. Christian salvation, the horrors of civil war, the stage as a secondary world, the symbolic import of magic, dreams and ghosts — Bate brilliantly delineates their classical origins and redeployment in Shakespeare’s work.

Source: www.washingtonpost.com