How the classics made Shakespeare Ben Jonson famously accused Shakespeare of having “small Latin and less Greek.” But he was exaggerating. Shakespeare was steeped in the classics. Shaped by his grammar school education in Roman literature history and rhetoric he moved to London a city that modeled itself on ancient Rome. He worked in a theatrical profession that had inherited the conventions and forms of classical drama and he read deeply in Ovid Virgil and Seneca. In a book of extraordinary range acclaimed literary critic and biographer Jonathan Bate one of the world’s leading authorities on Shakespeare offers groundbreaking insights into how perhaps more than any other influence the classics made Shakespeare the writer he became. Revealing in new depth the influence of Cicero and Horace on Shakespeare and finding new links between him and classical traditions ranging from myths and magic to monuments and politics Bate offers striking new readings of a wide array of the plays and poems. At the heart of the book is an argument that Shakespeare’s supreme valuation of the force of imagination was honed by the classical tradition and designed as a defense of poetry and theater in a hostile world of emergent Puritanism.