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7. Classical playslocked

  • Stanley Wells

Abstract

Shakespeare’s grammar school education gave him a thorough grounding in Latin, and possibly some Greek, and in the writings of classical authors. He drew on and developed this knowledge at every stage of his career, most conspicuously in the remarkably diverse tragedies and other plays in which he dramatized Greek and Roman history. ‘Classical plays’ first considers Titus Andronicus and then Julius Caesar, which he wrote seven or so years later. It also discusses Troilus and Cressida, Timon of Athens, and his last two classical plays Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra for which he drew far more extensively on Plutarch.

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