As it happened, English literature was in a fairly undistinguished state for much of the sixteenth century; but for whatever reason, it burst into brilliant flower in the later part of Elizabeth I’s reign. The Elizabethans’ literature makes ample use of classical motifs and allusions; like their visual art, it aspires toward the classical, but in this case combines that aspiration with a robust and native self-confidence. Spenser’s national epic, The Faery Queen, may serve to illustrate the point. It is in part a medievalizing work; as Ben Jonson noted with disapproval, his language affected the ancients - that is, English poets of the Middle Ages { Timber: or Discoveries). But at the same time it looks to modern Italy: Spenser’s ambition was to write in English a grand epic romance comparable to those that Tasso and Ariosto had written in Italian. And it is also in a classical tradition: the poem begins:
Lo I, the man whose muse whilom did mask,
As time her taught, in lowly shepherd’s weeds,
Am now enforced a far unfitter task:
For trumpets stern to change mine oaten reeds...
This echoes four lines with which, according to fourth-century commentators, Vergil had intended to begin his Aeneid. These lines are certainly spurious, but in the Renaissance they were commonly believed to be authentic. In them the poet declares that whereas he had previously written of country matters - that is, in the Eclogues and Georgics - he is now turning to epic. This fitted the idea {also derived from late antiquity) that Vergil had followed the perfect pattern of a poet’s career, beginning with pastoral, the lowliest genre, moving to the middle style in the Georgics, and finally ascending to epic grandeur. With this pattern in mind, Spenser had written a pastoral sequence of poems, The Shepherd’s Calendar, at the start of his career. In The Faery Queen he turns London into Troynovaunt, ‘‘New Troy,’’ with a fanciful derivation implied from the Trinovantes, an ancient British tribe. Similarly, the name of the warrior maiden Britomart is borrowed from a Greek nymph, Britomartis, with another imaginative etymology suggesting British martial prowess. To a later and purer classicism such things would seem quaint and archaic, but in Spenser’s synthesis the medievalizing and classicizing tendencies are not easily pulled apart.
The Elizabethans’ access to the classical world was overwhelmingly through Latin; Greek was a comparatively uncommon accomplishment, and a wide range of Greek
Reading rarer still. C. S. Lewis’s bon mot, that no sixteenth-century Englishman would have got a classical scholarship to a nineteenth-century university, may be an exaggeration, but it is not far from the truth. Sir Philip Sidney was noted for his knowledge of Greek: it was a part of the dazzling many-sidedness of this ‘‘renaissance man.’’ But Sidney had been in Paris and conversed with the scholar Stephanus; his ancient Greek was part of his European modernity and exceptionally cosmopolitan quality. Ben Jonson was also unusual in the strength of his classical attainments; he had studied under William Camden, presumably at Westminster School.
It was Jonson who famously declared in the preface to the First Folio that Shakespeare had ‘‘small Latin and less Greek,’’ and Milton was to evoke in L’Allegro the pleasure of hearing ‘‘sweetest Shakespeare, fancy’s child, / Warble his native wood-notes wild’’ (133-4). (Milton, one might note in passing, was a formidable scholar, not only acquainted with Hebrew but the first person to correct a particular corruption in the text of Euripides’ Bacchae. ) Such judgments have sometimes encouraged the belief that Shakespeare did not have much of a classical education - perhaps not much of an education at all. This is mistaken: the years of Latin drill at Stratford Grammar School would have given him a thorough knowledge of the language. Parts of the curriculum, however, might seem strange to the modern student. Quite often the first Latin text to be read was the Eclogues of Mantuan, pastiches of Virgil’s pastoral poems by a fifteenth-century Italian Carmelite; their pure Latinity and improving sentiments both commended them for school use. Holofernes, the comic schoolmaster in Love’s Labour’s Lost, burbles praise of Mantuan, quoting his very first line (4.2.95-6); this may indicate that Shakespeare, too, began his Latin reading here.
Shakespeare’s access to Plutarch, the source for most of his Roman plays, was indirect: he read him in Sir Thomas North’s English translation, which was itself made not from the original but from Amyot’s French version. An English translation of a French translation of a Greek historian writing about Rome - the case of Shakespeare’s Plutarch may seem to illustrate, once more, how far England was from the classical fountainhead. Yet this is only a half-truth: even in translation, and especially with prose authors, the reality came through pretty well. Shakespeare shows a sensitivity to the diversity within Plutarch’s lives: his life of Julius Caesar is strongly political, whereas his life of Antony turns into a romantic tragedy and reserves its last chapters not for its notional subject but for Cleopatra. Accordingly, Shakespeare makes his Julius Caesar a study in the manipulation of power; and he makes Antony and Cleopatra the joint protagonists in a story of egoisme a deux.
Shakespeare also understands how to balance the Latin and Anglo-Saxon registers of the language. Planning the murder of Desdemona, Othello uses plain, short words until he comes to her skin, whiter than snow ‘‘And smooth as monumental alabaster’’
(5.2.5) . All the Moor’s feelings oflove and admiration for Venetian beauty and civility are expressed in the momentary inflow of those classical polysyllables, before he returns to the simplest terms again: ‘‘Put out the light, and then put out the light’’
(5.2.6) . Hamlet’s dying speech is likewise very plain, except for the lovely, fluid Latinity of ‘‘Absent thee from felicity a while’’ (5.2.358). There speaks a prince; and in his next words, ‘‘And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, To tell my story,’’ there speaks everyman (5.2.359-60).
The orders of classical architecture seemed to impose strict rules; but with classical literature it was otherwise: here was a storehouse of diverse treasures. The case of satire illustrates how classical sources provided not one pattern or ideal on which the modern writer should model his own work, but a range of possibilities. Verse satire, Quintilian had observed, was entirely Roman (Institutiones oratoriae 10.1.93); and with Lucilius surviving only in fragments, there were in effect only three authors that the English satirist could take for an example, Horace, Persius, and Juvenal. Donne’s satires may strike us as awkward and angular, but they are made so deliberately, for in the poet’s mind is the knotty, difficult verse of Persius. When the scholar Isaac Casaubon, a Huguenot refugee who was to become a canon of the Church of England, published his edition of Persius in 1605, the vogue for this poet was further increased. But the grand declamatory manner of Juvenal was another model; and Samuel Johnson’s London and The Vanity of Human Wishes were to be avowedly ‘‘imitations’’ of Juvenal’s third and tenth satires. Yet another model was the urbane and conversational manner first evolved by Horace in his satires (which he himself called Sermones, Conversations), and further developed by him in his Epistles. Here lay the inspiration for Pope’s Epistles. So even within a genre as tightly defined as the verse satire, antiquity provided not so much a prescription as a range of possibilities.
The same may be said of pastoral. Here the dominant though not quite the only model was Vergil’s Eclogues, but this single work generated a variety of response. The rough, clodhopping character of Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar is likely to strike the modern reader as unclassical, but Spenser himself would not have thought so. One school of thought, based upon the authority of the ancient commentator Servius, saw Vergil’s Eclogues as allegorizing, moralistic, and affecting a rusticity of manner. Another school saw Vergil as the originator of pastoral in the form of arcadian idyll. Mantuan’s Eclogues, smoothly Vergilian in language but coarser and sterner in content, could seem to belong to either school. Milton’s Lycidas can be seen as a compendium of different versions of pastoral, compressed into the limits of a single poem.
Milton’s prose and verse also exemplify the elaborated, almost Baroque classicism that was one strand in the English literature of the seventeenth century. In Paradise Lost he not only used a richly Latinate vocabulary but imitated some forms of Latin syntax too. Samuel Johnson disliked this, writing in his Lives of the Poets, ‘‘Of him, at last may be said what Jonson said of Spenser, that he wrote no language.’ That remark forms an ironic comment upon the development of classical taste. For the earlier Jonson, ‘‘affecting the ancients’’ referred to Spenser’s medievalisms - to the respects in which he was unclassical; but Milton “wrote no language’’ through too great an imitation of classical Latin style.
In fact, Milton knew in his own fashion, as Shakespeare had known, the use of different registers of language. In a famous simile he declares that the paradise of Eden excelled in beauty even the fair field of Enna,
... where Proserpin gathering flowers Herself a fairer flower by gloomy Dis Was gathered, which cost Ceres all that pain To seek her through the world. . .
(Paradise Lost IV.269-72)
Inside the classical myth is enfolded the simplicity of ‘‘all that pain,’’ so that we appreciate at once the fruits of a rich culture and the bare grief of a mother for her child. On occasion, Milton may perhaps even look with irony upon his own Latin-isms. When Eve takes the apple, his account is extremely plain: ‘‘She plucked, she ate.. .all was lost’’ (9.781, 784). But once fallen, and ‘‘heightened as with Wine’’ (9.793), her diction becomes floridly classical:
O sovran, virtuous, precious of all trees In Paradise, of operation blest To sapience, hitherto obscured, infamed...
(9.795-7)
Milton includes in Paradise Regained an eloquent panegyric to the beauty and wisdom of ancient Athens; but it is put into the mouth of the Devil. Thus he dramatizes the double nature of the classical storehouse, at once a necessary source of enlightenment and a pagan or worldly temptation.
The late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries can be seen, from one point of view, as the high-water mark of classicism in England. Classical taste was now purified, scholarly, and informed. This was by some called England’s Augustan age even at the time, a label that indicates both an aspiration and an achievement. Yet from another point of view the classical past was beginning to lose a part of its significance. For centuries ancient texts had been essential to many areas of intellectual and even practical life, providing guidance on such varied matters as medicine, jurisprudence, philosophy, mathematics, and agriculture. England was at the forefront of the scientific revolution, which was rendering many of the old authorities obsolete: Harvey could tell you about the circulation of the blood, and Galen could not. In ‘‘Some Thoughts Concerning Education’’ John Locke argued that it was a waste of time and money to teach Latin to boys who would go into trade; on the other hand, ‘‘Latin I look upon as absolutely necessary to a gentleman.’’ Classical knowledge was now becoming an accomplishment, not a necessity - except for social purposes. Augustanism itself implied a certain detachment; it is an attitude adopted, an aesthetic choice self-consciously made. Pope called his Epistles ‘‘Imitations of Horace,’’ and Johnson imitated Juvenal; they put on classical costume, which, they suggest, they may put off once the performance is complete.
The changing character of the classical tradition in Britain in the eighteenth century is best understood in relation to a larger scene. Across Europe, the eighteenth century sees, sometimes slowly, sometimes abruptly, a shift in style, attitude, and belief. This change finds political expression in the French Revolution, social expression in the ideal of the noble savage and the natural man, visual expression in a revolt against the Baroque and a cultivation of austere simplicity. It also affected the way in which classical antiquity was regarded. There was a tendency now to see Roman art and life as pompously grandiose and elaborate, while Roman literature was considered too imitative of Greek models. Homer - now seen as grand, primitive, and natural - began his ascent toward his apotheosis in the Romantic age.
The Baroque manner itself depended on the classical tradition in that it exploited and indeed required the classical vocabulary of architecture; but it twisted, teased, and distorted classical forms. Originating in Italy, it spread across most of Europe, and even England had its Baroque period. Wren incorporated Italian influences into his personal style. Vanbrugh’s highly idiosyncratic Baroque included towers and picturesque skylines that seemed to evoke the Elizabethan prodigy house or even the Middle Ages; as often in English history, an engagement with the classical tradition was an engagement with another time or place as well. But much earlier than the Continent, England turned away from the Baroque to a style that they called Palladian, harking back to Andrea Palladio and the Cinquecento, and through him to ancient Rome. Palladianism was not, of course, a reproduction of antiquity, but its practitioners saw themselves as the ancient world’s true heirs. ‘‘The Italians can now no more relish the Antique simplicity,’’ wrote Colen Campbell in 1715 in his Vitruvius Britannicus. Ironically, the British could now instruct the Romans, on this view, in the true Roman taste.
Accordingly, the shift toward neoclassicism, when it came later in the century, was a gentler and more pragmatic matter than on much of the Continent. But there was another reason why the British movement toward neoclassicism was more empirical than in other countries, and this is that it was, almost literally, an archaeological process. As British power and wealth grew, and as the Ottoman empire opened up a little to the west, British travelers began to explore classical sites and to publish their findings. In splendid folio volumes Robert Wood published the ruins of Palmyra in 1753 and Baalbek in 1757, and these editions inspired Robert Adam to publish in 1764 the late Roman remains of Diocletian’s palace at Spalatro (now Split). He had indeed gone to Spalatro with the purpose of advancing his career as an architect, and the Adam style was to be a personal synthesis of forms and motifs found in these late-antique remains. Other recent discoveries were laid under contribution, too: the finds at Pompeii and Herculaneum, and the Greek vases found in Italy, which were at that time believed to be Etruscan. The houses built by Adam and his followers often have a Pompeian or an Etruscan room.
When Adam enlarged Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire, the centerpiece of his south front was based upon the forms of the Roman triumphal arch. The central hall is an adaptation of the Roman atrium. Yet one cannot quite call Adam a revivalist. It is partly that his sources were so eclectic, found in different lands and in periods separated by as much as 700 years, partly that Adam formed what he took into an original synthesis. The Adam style could be imitated by other architects, most brilliantly by James Wyatt. By a pleasing irony, when Catherine the Great imported the Scottish architect Charles Cameron to bring Adam’s Roman style to Russia, where he made additions to the Summer Palace and built the imperial villa at Pavlovsk, her choice was an expression of Anglophilia. The Adam synthesis, developed out of classical sources, had become distinctively British.
World History
