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"This book seeks to invert Ben Jonson's claim that Shakespeare had 'small Latin and less Greek' and to prove that, in fact, there is more Greek and less Latin in a significant group of Shakespeare's texts: a group whose generic hybridity (tragic-comical-historical-romance) exemplifies the hybridity of Greece in the early modern imagination. To early modern England, Greece was an enigma. It was the origin and idealised pinnacle of Western philosophy, tragedy, democracy, heroic human endeavour and, at the same time, an example of decadence: a fallen state, currently under Ottoman control, and therefore an exotic, dangerous, 'Other' in the most disturbing senses of the word. Indeed, while Britain was struggling to establish itself as a nation state and an imperial authority by emulating classical Greek models, this ambition was radically unsettled by early modern Greece's subjection to the Ottoman Empire, which rendered Europe's eastern borders dramatically vulnerable. Focussing, for the first time, on Shakespeare's 'Greek' texts (Venus and Adonis, The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Love's Labour's Lost, Troilus and Cressida, Timon of Athens, King Lear, Pericles, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, and The Two Noble Kinsmen), the v. considers how Shakespeare's use of antiquity and Greek myth intersects with early modern perceptions of the country and its empire. "-- Machine generated contents note: -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Embodying Greece in Elizabethan England: Venus and Adonis and Love's Labour's Lost -- 3. Greece "digested in a play": Consuming Greek Heroism in The School of Abuse and Troilus and Cressida -- 4. Timon of Athens and Greek "Democracy" -- 5. The Comedy of Errors and "farthest Greece" -- 6. Reshaping Athens in A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Two Noble Kinsmen -- 7. "To take our imagination / From bourn to bourn, region to region": The Politics of Greek Topographies in Pericles -- 8. Simulating Magna Graecia in The Winter's Tale -- 9. Shakespeare and Ancient Greek Philosophy: 'Nomos' and 'Physis' in King Lear -- 10. Cognitive (Re)generation: Sycorax versus Hymen reinvented in The Tempest -- 11. "Midsummer" in Modern Athens: Dreaming in Greek
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