As part of my Greek shadow journey, I've been revisiting Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

The play draws from a number of sources of inspiration. The ones usually cited include Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Geoffrey Chaucer's The Knight's Tale, and Ovid's Metamorphoses (excerpts from which I remember being forced to read in Latin class at school).

More interesting, though, is Earl Showerman's argument that the play also exemplifies elements of Greek Old Comedy, and draws specifically on Aristophanes's play, The Birds...

Which leads on to a fascinating set of questions, which I've really enjoyed following up.

To what extent was Shakespeare directly inspired by Greek tragedy? How much Greek -- or Latin, for that matter -- did Shakespeare actually know? How much material would have been available to him?



Some sources maintain that Shakespeare, despite enjoying little in the way of formal education, and having (in Ben Johnson's oft-quoted comment) "small Latin and less Greek", was a fast learner and a keen reader, and "his lack of Greek wouldn't have been a problem as he would have had access to translations of Latin and Greek texts".

Others hold that Shakespeare's Latin was pretty good, and he would have been able to read Ovid and Plutarch (key influences) in the original. The sort of education he likely had access to would also have given him some Greek.

Another line of thinking goes further, holding that the Greek classics were not only important to Shakespeare, but also that he read them in the original at a sophisticated level. He includes, for example, details that are in the Greek originals, but not in Ovid's Latin retelling of them; he appears to coin words (dialogue, metamorphize, pander, ode, mimic...) directly from classical Greek; he writes sonnets that draw on sources that had not been translated; "the style and nuance of the Greek language, as used by its greatest writers, is embedded in Shakespeare"; and Greek plot-lines, philosophy, and ethics are all detectable in his work to an extent not wholly explicable by conduits such as Plutarch.

But even if Shakespeare was much better at languages than Johnson reckoned, where did he get his materials? Hopkins maintains: "Unless there was a Greek scholar in Stratford at the time who owned the rare and expensive books he would have needed to absorb the texts that he has been shown to have read and understood, there was little then that would have been available to a youth like William. During what would have been his years of study, the 1570s into the 1580s, the books he would have needed were being published on the Continent in small runs of very expensive editions and sold at book fairs in Lyon and Frankfurt. Doubtless some made their way to England, but how many to Stratford?"

So, it's a all bit of a conundrum. Unless, of course, the author of Shakespeare's plays was actually someone like the classically educated Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford...

I'll leave the experts to keep fighting that one out.

The picture at the top is St Johns Alley, Norwich, which takes its name from the church of St John, Maddermarket: "In 1921 Nugent Monck moved his Maddermarket Theatre from Ninhams Court into an early Roman Catholic chapel. Monck was committed to reproducing authentic Elizabethan staging of drama. It's fitting that this was the place where in 1599 the thespian Will Kemp jumped over the churchyard wall at the end of his nine-day morris dance from London to Norwich, winning his bet with Shakespeare."

I wonder what Will Kemp thought of Shakespeare's Greek...