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. 

Heather James is Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Classics at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA. Previous publications include Ovid and the Liberty of Speech in Shakespeare’s England (2021) and Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire (1997, 2000).

Andrew Wallace is Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Carleton University, Canada. Previous publications include Virgil’s Schoolboys: The Poetics of Pedagogy in Renaissance England (2010), The Presence of Rome in Early Modern Britain: Texts, Artefacts and Beliefs (2020) and the co-edited collection Taking Exception to the Law: Materializing Injustice in Early Modern English Literature, ed. Donald Beecher, Travis DeCook, Andrew Wallace, and Grant Williams (2015).