JONSON, SHAKESPEARE, AND EARLY MODERN VIRGIL.(Review)

JONSON, SHAKESPEARE, AND EARLY MODERN VIRGIL. By Margaret Tudeau-Clayton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xii + 267; 5 illustrations. $59.95.

Margaret Tudeau-Clayton's erudition and latinity are on convincing display from beginning to end of Jonson, Shakespeare, and Early Modern Virgil. This study undertakes an extensive project: to survey the significance and function, within the literary culture of Renaissance England, of classical Rome's most influential poet. Inevitably, this task also forces Tudeau-Clayton to come to grips with the two most influential poets of Renaissance England itself. And likewise, while examining these authors and their interrelations, Tudeau-Clayton considers a wide range of subsidiary matters, such as the role of Virgil in the early modern English educational curriculum; the function of classical learning as a marker of social difference in the Renaissance; the relation between Catholic and Protestant, medieval and early modern representations of Virgil; and the relative status of classical learning in Shakespeare's and Jonson's plays. Drawing on an impressive fund of classical and early-modern philological expertise, Tudeau-Clayton addresses …