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As early as Ben Jonson's sniping at his rival's "small Latin and less Greek," Shakespeare's relationship to "insolent Greece or haughty Rome" has carried ideological weight. In this same poem where he thus singled out his fellow's ignorance, Jonson did glorify Shakespeare as the "triumph" of Britain. Indeed, Shakespeare's indifference to neoclassicism has been as much celebrated as deplored. Many scholars have delighted in narrating the victory of a vigorous native English tradition over a cold, academic, and moribund neoclassical movement. Most notably in this century, in revising the image of Shakespeare as the learned humanist poet, Robert Weimann gave us Shakespeare the man of the theater, whose vitality stemmed from the popular dramatic tradition.' Completing his own scheme, Jonson remains the "haughty" archclassicist, always outdone by the quintessentially British Shakespeare.
In her account of Jonson, Shakespeare, and Early Modern Virgil, Margaret Tudeau-Clayton contributes fascinating new material to this oft-told story. Her broader theme is the circulation of "Virgil" in early modern England, that is, the cultural uses of Virgil's texts and the images of Virgil as the perfect writer, the magician, and the natural philosopher. According to Tudeau-Clayton, in early modern English culture Virgil became what Shakespeare is now for us: "an ideal, absolute paradigm of the national poet; a repository of universal human wisdom; a stable, monolithic and sacred object of reverential attention at the centre of a homogeneous community of educated readers/spectators" (2). Even though Shakespeare may now occupy Virgil's chair, through her reading of The Tempest she fashions a Shakespeare who challenges this Virgil and destabilizes a Renaissance "Virgilian" cosmos that is hierarchical, atemporal, and harmonious. Her Jonson, in turn, stakes...