Shakespeare’s Latin Citations: The Editorial Problem

Summary

T. W. Baldwin’s monumental and authoritative study, William Shakspere’s Small Latine & Lesse Greeke (2 vols., Urbana, 1944), has finally established the extent of Shakespeare’s competence in Latin. His thorough grounding in the school authors of his day, and the extent to which the Latin-dominated curriculum of the Elizabethan grammar school permeated his consciousness and his writing, can no longer be doubted. Baldwin’s conclusions have been reinforced by J. A. K. Thomson’s Shakespeare and the Classics (London, 1952), and, more recently, by J. E. Hankins in Backgrounds of Shakespeare’s Thought (Hassocks, 1978). Hankins, in a thoughtful study of Shakespeare’s reading, concludes that ‘Shakespeare had the linguistic equipment to read Latin if he cared to do so’ (p. 13), and argues persuasively that Shakespeare’s knowledge of untranslated Latin texts can be discerned from a reading of his plays.