Imagining Antiquity in Shakespeare’s England

This volume takes a broader approach, moving away from a notion of antiquity as a series of literary sources toward a notion of antiquity as a body of concepts, formal practices, and innovations for use and adaptation in early modern prose, poetry, and drama.

The essays in this edited collection extend our understanding of the challenges and opportunities that the classical world afforded Shakespeare and his contemporaries. At the same time, they encourage modern scholarship to reevaluate the significance of antiquity in early modern England. Studies of classical heritage often focus on imitation and the transmission of specific classical texts in relation to early modern ones. This volume takes a broader approach, moving away from a notion of antiquity as a series of literary sources toward a notion of antiquity as a body of concepts, formal practices, and innovations for use and adaptation in early modern prose, poetry, and drama. In varied but complementary ways, the essays in this collection interrogate Shakespeare’s engagement with the past in relation to his contemporaries as well as his classical models. The collection emphasizes questions of language, temporality, reading and writing, and performance.