Jonson, Shakespeare and Early Modern Virgil

In this wide-ranging and original study, Margaret Tudeau-Clayton examines how Virgil - the poet as well as his texts - was mediated in early modern England. She analyses what was at stake in the reproduction of these mediations of Virgil, focusing specifically on the works of Ben Jonson and on one of Shakespeare’s most resonantly Virgilian plays, The Tempest. She argues that the play offers a complex model of cultural and sociopolitical resistance by engaging critically not only with contemporary mediations of Virgil, but with the ways they were used, especially by Jonson, to reproduce structures of authority (in relation to nature and language as well as to the sociopolitical order). She also shows how instructive comparisons may be drawn between the ways Virgil was constructed and used in early modern England and the ways Shakespeare has been constructed and used, especially as national poet, from the early modern period until our own time.

• A theoretically informed overview of Jonson’s Virgil and the place of Virgil in early modern England • An interesting interpretation of Shakespeare’s play The Tempest • A case study in cultural/social hegemony and resistance

List of illustrations; Preface; Bibliographical note; Introduction; Part I. Figures of Virgil and Their Place in Early Modern England: 1. English readers’ Virgils; 2. Informing youth, and confirming man: an English schoolboy’s Virgils; 3. Secrets of nature and culture: the learned man’s Virgils; Part II. Jonson, Shakespeare and Figures of Virgil: 4. \'The most learned of poets\': Jonson’s use of Virgilian authority; 5. Of ‘chaste ear’ and ‘soveraigne worth’: Jonson’s use of Virgil as author; 7. Shaking Neptune’s ‘dread trident’: The Tempest and figures of Virgil; Bibliography; Index.