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Shakespeareâs Books
Michael Ursell and Melissa Yinger
Michel de Montaigne, bibliophile, skeptic, and classicist, described his reading habits in the essay âOf Booksâ thus: âI do not search and toss over books but for an honester recreation to please, and pastime to delight my self: or if I study, I only endeavor to find out the knowledge that teacheth ⊠me how to die well and how to live well.â1 Montaigneâs seemingly relaxed approach to his studies has something in common with the way Shakespeare is imagined to have made use of classical books: like Montaigne, Shakespeareâs reading of the classics often seems idiosyncratic and informal, balancing pleasure and instruction, but with the scales tipped slightly in favor of the former. Unlike Montaigne, however, Shakespeare almost certainly did not write at a desk in a personal library encircled by over 1,000 books, glancing occasionally at sententiae carved and painted onto the beams. Partly because no material traces of Shakespeareâs library remain, it was once common for readers to imagine him writing without recourse to any books at all.2
What can be said about Shakespeareâs library? He made no mention of books in his will.3 We know far more about the libraries of his contemporaries, John Donne and Ben Jonson. Donneâs books, of which 213 have been identified, are somewhat characteristic of an early modern library, the majority treating theology (Keynes). Of Jonsonâs library around 225 books have been found, representing an atypical collection that privileged the classics, poetry, and poetics (McPherson). In Shakespeareâs era, an impressive library would have comprised 400â600 books, with truly rare collections, like the Sidney library at Penshurst, containing at least around 4,500 volumes.4 These numbers give researchers some useful parameters for speculating on the size and shape of Shakespeareâs library, but not on its specific contents.
In this chapter, we examine three works that have been the subject of intensive and revealing source studies. The first is Titus Andronicus, a play that clearly reflects Shakespeareâs extensive and early reading in the classics. The second is The Rape of Lucrece, a poem that exposes the challenges of working with classical books, even while suggesting that the lessons of classicism are so clear they need not be read. Finally, the later play Troilus and Cressida shows the role of printersâfrom the earliest English ones to those of Shakespeareâs eraâin shaping classicism. In all three texts, Shakespeare used certain books of Latin and Greek literature within a framework that we could coherently call âclassicism,â even if his classicism is not ours.
Grammar school books
âWhat is the end of study?â
(LLL 1.1.55)
In his foundational survey of sixteenth-century translations of the classics into English, Henry Burrowes Lathrop relates Tudor classicism to the humanism of the great Renaissance scholar, textual editor, and writer Desiderius Erasmus. What Lathrop calls the âorganic unityâ of the Erasmian project (32) relied on continental Europe for new editions of the classics, including Aldus Manutiusâs beautifully printed books. Among the Aldine editions was the Adagia, or Adagesâan extensive commentary on famous sayings, prepared by Erasmus and first published in 1500â which Thomas Greene calls âa vast, baggy, shapeless hulk of a bookâ (1).
The Adagia gave readers access to a copious collection of sources, but it did so in a way that supported indirect, fragmented transmission. If an English writer drew on a line from Horace, it might have come from the Adagia or even a translation of it, such as Richard Tavernerâs from 1539, rather than from one of the sixteenth-century Horace editions printed in London (Gillespie 158). Thus, sixteenth-century classicism evolved alongside new markets for printed books. And these books allowed for unexpected uses that broke away from any single, monolithic project of classicism. (Although Lathrop turns to printed books to affirm classicismâs coherence across early modern translation projects, such evidence excludes the networks of manuscript publication and circulation through which English writers worked with Latin and Greek literature, via commonplace books, manuscript copies, and personal annotated editions. The Erasmian ideal of copia or abundance of rhetorical expression, in practice, led to a proliferation of heterogeneous book objects.)
Although England lacked a printer like Manutius to shape Erasmian classicism into a collection of books with similar designs, the kingdom did have one standardized Latin textbook, mandated by Henry VIII and known as âLilyâs Grammar.â First printed in 1533, with an educational philosophy derived primarily from Erasmusâs De ratione studii, this practical book continued to be reprinted every few years throughout the sixteenth centuryâsometimes in English and Latin, sometimes entirely in Latin. Like the Adagia, âLilyâs Grammarâ gave students like Shakespeare short, disassembled pieces of Vergil and Ovid while they learned figures of speech and Latin prosody. One famous line, from the Aeneid, illustrated the caesura, or pause, in a metrical verse line (âOmnia vincit amor et nos cedamus amoriâ [G6v]). Another, from Ovid, illustrated elegiac meter (âRes est solliciti plena timoris amorâ [G7]). When Shakespeare attended grammar school, the books designed to shape him into a classicist according to a programâand some of the first books he is likely to have studied formallyâintroduced Latin literature according to a clear structure, but one that left open the possibility of reassembling the fragments into new forms.
Loveâs Laborâs Lost, a play with no direct classical source but one which is generally seen to satirically represent book-learning, depicts a child mocking characters who have become âlearnĂšd fool[s]â (5.2.72) despite their training in Latin and the classics: âThey have been at a great feast / of languages and stolen the scrapsâ (5.1.35â36). Although meant as an insult, the line suggests how the classics could circulate in âscrapsââpieces of Latin scattered in grammar books and commonplace booksâand be redeployed as such. Loveâs Laborâs Lost describes the culture of bookishness that Shakespeare inhabited, which could strip classicism of any sense of stable coherence. Nathaniel, in an attempt to excuse Dullâs ignorance to Holofernes, imagines working with books as a kind of nutrition: âSir, he hath never fed of the dainties that are bred in a book. He hath not eat paper, as it were; he hath not drunk ink: his intellect is not replenishedâ (4.2.24â26).
Books like âLilyâs Grammarâ were meant to be fully digested: the student would learn to read, write, and speak the classics so effectively that he would soon no longer need the book. Lilyâs note to the reader explains, âThese preceptes well kept will bring a man clean past the use of this Grammar booke & make him as ready as his bokeâ (xviii). That Tudor pedagogy encouraged students to move âclean pastâ their books may explain why scholars struggle to untangle Shakespeareâs classical references.5 One characteristic of the advanced student, according to the translators of an Erasmian publication dated 1545, was his ability to âcarry his leson in myndeâ (Baldwin 1944: 98). Advanced students were encouraged to âmake somewhat alone, without exampleâ (Kempe 223), which effectively trained them to detach themselves from books as material objects. In trying to point directly to the books that Shakespeare used, therefore, we may be seeking a connection that Shakespeare intentionally severed.
Titusâs biblio-copia
Placed side by side, the early play Titus Andronicus and the late play The Tempest can illustrate the grammar school trajectory, which begins with a close attachment to oneâs books and ends by leaving them behind. When Prospero casts his book away (5.1.57), this is perhaps because it has distracted him from his responsibilities and from Milan, or perhaps because he has advanced beyond his need of it. Yet Shakespeareâs books seem closer than ever in this speech, which is his most extended quotation from a classical text, deriving from Medeaâs speech in Book 7 of Ovidâs Metamorphoses. Kenneth Muir observes that it makes use of both Ovidâs Latin and Goldingâs English, at times correcting Golding. Even âthirty years after he left school,â Muir explains, âShakespeare remembered enough Latin to improve on the accuracy of Goldingâs translationâ (3). The moment demonstrates the long after-effects of grammar school book use, hinting at a conflicted drive to hold on to classical books and at the same time to let go of books.
Titus Andronicus, written at the beginning of Shakespeareâs career, contains the greatest number of âdefinite and detailedâ classical references (Root 15).6 The playâs allusions invoke and cite classical texts in ways that the later plays generally do not, giving the impression that Shakespeare âhad his Ovid or Vergil open before him as he wroteâ (15); others were probably open before him as well. Shakespeareâs early classicism in Titus Andronicus provides a reference point for the books that would be most influential over the course of his career: Ovid, Seneca, Vergil, and, intertwined with these, Homer, Horace, Herodotus, Plutarch, and Livy.
The playâs use of Seneca exemplifies Shakespeareâs movement among multiple editions and translations from the classics. Titusâs outcry against Laviniaâs violation and mutilation borrows from the Phaedra (671â72), while also drawing on Senecaâs Epistle 107. Titusâs LatinââMagni dominator poli, / Tam lentus audis scelera? tam lentos videsââconflates the Phaedraâs âMagne regnator deum, / tam lentus audis scelera? tam lentus videsâ with the epistleâs âparens celsique dominator poliâ (Bullough 27). Since a grammar school-educated reader of Latin was encouraged to take leave of his books, it is difficult to decide whether Shakespeare misremembered or intentionally transformed quotations he had read in grammar school or afterwards.
Shakespeareâs frequent use of these multiple âSenecasâ in Titus Andronicus and beyond suggests the use of a variety of sources. While his conflation of lines from the Phaedra and Epistle 107 attests to his awareness of Seneca in Latin volumes, he would have also read Senecaâs tragedies in the English quarto Seneca: His Tenne Tragedies, printed by Thomas Newton in 1581.7 This book brought together the English translations of various Senecan tragedies, most of which had already been printed in the 1560s. To these extant translationsâJasper Heywoodâs Hercules Furens, Thyestes, and Troas; Alexander Nevileâs Oedipus; John Studleyâs Hippolytus, Medea, Agamemnon, and Hercules Oetaeus; and Thomas Nuceâs Octaviaâ Newton added his own version of Thebais.8 Shakespeareâs Seneca, therefore, underscores a difference between twenty-first- and sixteenth-century classicism: while modern scholarship strives for complete, authoritative editions of texts by single authors, Shakespeare accessed his classics in various states of completion, and in collections that brought together the work of multiple editors and translators in a single book.
Many of the other sources refe...