SOURCE: "Shakespeare's Roman World," in The Literary Half-Yearly, Vol. XV, No. 2, July, 1974, pp. 45-63.

In the essay below, Muir analyzes Shakespeare's handling of Roman themes, maintaining that despite certain trivial anachronisms, the playwright's "knowledge of the Roman world and of Roman literature was considerable."

We have it on the authority of Ben Jonson that Shakespeare had small Latin and less Greek—which doesn't mean hardly any Latin and no Greek. Throughout the 18th century there were arguments about the extent of his knowledge of the Classics, arguments which were temporarily settled by the proof that he could have read most Latin authors in translation. But in the present century the various massive works by T. W. Baldwin have shown that Shakespeare apparently underwent an ordinary Grammar School training and that he had read a number of Latin works in the original. We know, for example, that he knew...