Laudator Temporis Acti

Jonathan Bate, How the Classics Made Shakespeare (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), p. 12 with note on p. 291:

There could be no better example of the rhetorical figure of litotes—understatement by way of ironizing negative—than to say that Shakespeare was not unfamiliar with the classics, whatever the formidably learned Ben Jonson might have been implying when he joked that his friend and rival was worthy to be named alongside the great dramatists of antiquity "Though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek."⁴⁵ As has often been remarked, the "small Latin" of a provincial grammar-school boy in the age of the first Queen Elizabeth would have been large by the standards of many a university Classics graduate in the age of the second.

45. Dedicatory poem in the Shakespeare First Folio. In his elegant and concise Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2013), Colin Burrow points out the ambiguity of Jonson’s "though": the line is usually interpreted as "despite the fact that you only had a smattering of Latin and less Greek," it could alternatively mean "even supposing (counterfactually) that you only had a smattering of Latin and less Greek, the major classical dramatists would still admire you" (p. 2).

Thanks very much to the anonymous benefactor who sent me a copy of Bate's book.