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.Thanks very much to the anonymous benefactor who sent me a copy of Bate's book.
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).
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Friday, September 13, 2019
Small or Large?
Jonathan Bate, How the Classics Made Shakespeare (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), p. 12 with note on p. 291: