E. H. Gombrich Lecture

Jonathan Bate is Foundation Professor of Environmental Humanities at Arizona State University and Senior Research Fellow at Oxford University. His many books include Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare. He broadcasts regularly for the BBC, is the coeditor of The RSC Shakespeare: Complete Works, and wrote an acclaimed one-man play for Simon Callow, Being Shakespeare. Twitter @profbate From one of our most eminent and accessible literary critics, a groundbreaking account of how the Greek and Roman classics forged Shakespeare's imagination Ben Jonson famously accused Shakespeare of having "small Latin and less Greek." But he was exaggerating. Shakespeare was steeped in the classics. Shaped by his grammar school education in Roman literature, history, and rhetoric, he moved to London, a city that modeled itself on ancient Rome. He worked in a theatrical profession that had inherited the conventions and forms of classical drama, and he read deeply in Ovid, Virgil, and Seneca. In a book of extraordinary range, acclaimed literary critic and biographer Jonathan Bate, one of the world's leading authorities on Shakespeare, offers groundbreaking insights into how, perhaps more than any other influence, the classics made Shakespeare the writer he became. Revealing in new depth the influence of Cicero and Horace on Shakespeare and finding new links between him and classical traditions, ranging from myths and magic to monuments and politics, Bate offers striking new readings of a wide array of the plays and poems. At the heart of the book is an argument that Shakespeare's supreme valuation of the force of imagination was honed by the classical tradition and designed as a defense of poetry and theater in a hostile world of emergent Puritanism. Rounded off with a fascinating account of how Shakespeare became our modern classic and has ended up playing much the same role for us as the Greek and Roman classics did for him, How the Classics Made Shakespeare combines stylistic brilliance, accessibility, and scholarship, demonstrating why Jonathan Bate is one of our most eminent and readable literary critics. "[In this] amazingly erudite new study . . . Jonathan Bate shows that this process of repurposing old stories has always been the point of Shakespeare."---Daniel Swift, The Spectator "[How the Classics Made Shakespeare is] frequently exquisite."---Elizabeth Winkler, Wall Street Journal "How the Classics Made Shakespeare deserves an accolade too seldom awarded to academic works: Besides being eminently readable, it proffers illuminating observations and facts on every page."---Michael Dirda, Washington Post "Jonathan Bate does not disappoint. . . . An absolute tour de force, a scholar non pareil, in every regard."---Ian Lipke, Queensland Reviewers Collective "His scholarship is impeccable, his writing clear and vibrant. The study is a real delight, never ponderous, wonderfully insightful."---Alan Dent, Penniless Press "Bate well reminds us that the survival of the classical world he has explored is under an even greater threat, as its literature and history recede from our educational curricula. We have even smaller Latin and even less Greek."---Paul Dean, The New Criterion "At his best, Bate is utterly enthralling . . . . [How the Classics Made Shakespeare] is a wonderful, enlightening read."---Chris Tudor, Argo "Bate is excellent at discussing text and context, Shakespeare and his contemporaries as well as the classics. Bate's style is elegant, his learning informative, and his book rich beyond what a review can tell."---Jonathan Locke Hart, Renaissance & Reformation "Discussions of classical influence on Shakespeare have generally looked at specific quotes, references, and allusions. By contrast, in this thorough study notable Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate takes a different approach: he considers the influence of classical works on the Elizabethan mindset, arguing that one must consider t

Marjorie Curry Woods is the Jane and Roland Blumberg Centennial Professor of English, Professor of Comparative Literature, and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of An Early Commentary on the "Poetria nova" of Geoffrey of Vinsauf and Classroom Commentaries: Teaching the "Poetria nova" across Medieval and Renaissance Europe. Saint Augustine famously "wept for Dido, who killed herself by the sword," and many later medieval schoolboys were taught to respond in similarly emotional ways to the pain of female characters in Virgil's Aeneid and other classical texts. In Weeping for Dido, Marjorie Curry Woods takes readers into the medieval classroom, where boys identified with Dido, where teachers turned an unfinished classical poem into a bildungsroman about young Achilles, and where students not only studied but performed classical works. Woods opens the classroom door by examining teachers' notes and marginal commentary in manuscripts of the Aeneid and two short verse narratives: the Achilleid of Statius and the Ilias latina, a Latin epitome of Homer's Iliad. She focuses on interlinear glosses-individual words and short phrases written above lines of text that elucidate grammar, syntax, and vocabulary, but that also indicate how students engaged with the feelings and motivations of characters. Interlinear and marginal glosses, which were the foundation of the medieval classroom study of classical literature, reveal that in learning the Aeneid, boys studied and empathized with the feelings of female characters; that the unfinished Achilleid was restructured into a complete narrative showing young Achilles mirroring his mentors, including his mother, Thetis; and that the Ilias latina offered boys a condensed version of the Iliad focusing on the deaths of young men. Manuscript evidence even indicates how specific passages could be performed. The result is a groundbreaking study that provides a surprising new picture of medieval education and writes a new chapter in the reception history of classical literature. "This book will be of vital interest to scholars of medieval education. Classicists interested in the medieval reception of classical texts will also find it fascinating."---Rachel Moss, Times Higher Education " [A] book that is more than a stunning work of scholarship-it is an immersive experience that transports the reader across space and time into the sounds and fury of women in the medieval classroom."---Alex Mueller, Studies in the Age of Chaucer "Weeping for Dido is an important, groundbreaking book that shows that classical Latin texts were as foundational as biblical ones in medieval elementary classrooms and were copiously learned by boys throughout Europe, despite or indeed because of their ancient heroic content and frequent focus on women wronged by men. This book should appeal to a broad audience of scholars interested in oral-literate cultures, medieval and early modern education, the classical tradition, rhetoric, early humanism and Renaissance literature, and the history of the book."-Mary Carruthers, New York University "Examining medieval manuscripts that have not been extensively studied by others, Marjorie Curry Woods, one of the leading authorities in the field, makes an important intervention in a number of areas: the study of the reception of canonical texts through commentaries, glosses, and marginalia; the history of education and of emotions; and the place of performance in a heavily textual culture. Weeping for Dido's contributions to these subjects will ensure it a readership beyond medievalists and manuscript experts."-Philip Hardie, University of Cambridge "Marjorie Curry Woods brings to life the experience of learning in the medieval classroom through her careful, imaginative interpretation of manuscript glosses and her analysis of schoolboys' participation in the emotions of fict

Philip Hardie is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Honorary Professor Emeritus of Latin at the University of Cambridge. His many books include Rumour and Renown and The Last Trojan Hero. A unique look at how classical notions of ascent and flight preoccupied early modern British writers and artists Between the late sixteenth century and early nineteenth century, the British imagination-poetic, political, intellectual, spiritual and religious-displayed a pronounced fascination with images of ascent and flight to the heavens. Celestial Aspirations explores how British literature and art during that period exploited classical representations of these soaring themes-through philosophical, scientific and poetic flights of the mind; the ascension of the disembodied soul; and the celestial glorification of the ruler. From textual reachings for the heavens in Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Donne and Cowley, to the ceiling paintings of Rubens, Verrio and Thornhill, Philip Hardie focuses on the ways that the history, ideologies and aesthetics of the postclassical world received and transformed the ideas of antiquity. In England, narratives of ascent appear on the grandest scale in Milton's Paradise Lost, an epic built around a Christian plot of falling and rising, and one of the most intensely classicizing works of English poetry. Examining the reception of flight up to the Romanticism of Wordsworth and Tennyson, Hardie considers the Whig sublime, as well as the works of Alexander Pope and Edward Young. Throughout, he looks at motivations both public and private for aspiring to the heavens-as a reward for political and military achievement on the one hand, and as a goal of individual intellectual and spiritual exertion on the other. Celestial Aspirations offers an intriguing look at how creative minds reworked ancient visions of time and space in the early modern era. "[Hardie's] engagement with early modern British literature and art is impressive. Scholarly yet approachable."---P. E. Ojennus, Choice "A sublime intellectual journey that holds appeal to a wide range of audiences"---Bobby Xinyue, Times Literary Supplement "Impressively learned."---Tobias Gregory, London Review of Books "This almost impossibly learned book traces the literary and pictorial motif of human flight and ascension, through the heavens and expanses of space, in British literature from the late sixteenth through the early nineteenth century and in the classical tradition. It defines a topos of sublimity-of imagination, science and religious feeling-whose significance becomes clear as the examples multiply and Hardie's penetrating readings move from one important artist to the next."-David Quint, Yale University "Celestial Aspirations is a splendidly enterprising exploration of the major artistic, religious and political themes of ascent and flight to the heavens, traced from their classical roots through to the English poetry and art of the early modern period. This brilliant book combines comparative literary analysis with art history, moving with ease from Plato and Virgil to Milton and the great painted ceilings of Stuart and early Georgian England, and presents an impressive model of interdisciplinary classical reception."-Stephen Harrison, University of Oxford "Clear and authoritative, Celestial Aspirations contains many acute readings and comparisons across a very wide range of classical and early modern poetry. Hardie has an excellent reputation for this kind of literary appreciation rooted in close reading, and his skills are evident."-Victoria Moul, University College London "Celestial Aspirations is an extraordinarily erudite, interdisciplinary investigation of the enduring fantasy of achieving liftoff. Focusing on the reception of classical texts in Britain from the late sixteenth to the eighteenth century, Hardie's book offers new perspectives on the classical tradition and on the history of ide