Shakespeare And Classical Civilization | Clifford Leech (lecture date 1963)
Clifford Leech (lecture date 1963)
SOURCE: "Shakespeare's Greeks," in Stratford Papers on Shakespeare, edited by B. W. Jackson, W. J. Gage Limited, 1964, pp. 1-20.
[In the essay below, Leech argues that in such plays as Timon of Athens and Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare's choice of a Greek setting "was bound up with his desire for experiment and for the taking of an oblique view of the world. "]
One of the things which demonstrate the variety of Shakespeare's work is the difficulty we sometimes experience in attaching a generic label to an individual play. When the great Folio was published in 1623, its contents were divided into comedies, histories, and tragedies. This was a fairly rough classification, putting Cymbeline among the tragedies and keeping the label 'history' for plays immediately dependent on the sixteenth-century prose chronicles and concerned with events of comparatively recent date. Since that...
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