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When this volume appeared, it quickly sparked considerable-and disputatious-interest. Why? Its title is bland, almost Victorian. And this seeming conservatism is borne out by the book's old-fashioned contents, its chapters focused on authors and genres. A framing introduction is followed by a chapter on Shakespeare's education, "Learning from the Past"; next are chapters on "Virgil" and "Ovid" (epic), "Roman Comedy" (Plautus and Terence), "Seneca" (tragedy), "Plutarch," and a conclusion. As these chapter titles suggest, Burrow's Shakespeare is an author among authors-not a discursive construction, "Shakespeare," to be decomposed into material and ideological elements. As a youth learning Latin (but likely no or minimal Greek), he parses, translates, and imitates ancient texts. He then returns to a few favorite ancient sources over a lifetime of reading. But, of course, it is this very literariness that has set Burrow at odds with some in the scholarly crowd. A classicist, Michael Silk, even took him to task in The Times Literary Supplement for reviving a retrograde mythology of authorship (setting off a minor fracas in the "Letters").
Such charges of reaction may not be quite without point-but they are onesided. For Burrow's Shakespeare, if not radical, does not embody "classically" conservative literary values. Socially at once representative and marginal, a grammar-school man writing among university graduates, he is sensitive to social distinctions in ways that leak through the confident structures of his art. Despite imperfect book learning, he tries to keep up in his own way, yet can resort to mockery of the educational attainments he lacks. Vulnerable, pragmatic, changeable-if anything, he is as much a Romantic as a "classic." To many readers, such sympathetic author-centered criticism feels refreshing. Burrow explores intertextuality through verbal allusions, thematic resonances, and plausible authorial intentions. The result joins philological insight to a generous, humane sensibility. At the same time, Burrow has done his homework: having read historicist scholarship on antiquity as a site and source of early modern political discourse, he often cites this scholarship and uses it, though few of his arguments hinge on it.
The first two chapters interrogate the well-worn themes suggested by Burrow's title. The term "antiquity" for Shakespeare has no single meaning, but a problematic double sense-a reverent name for a glorious "classical" past and a common...