How Was Shakespeare Influenced by Ancient Greece?

It was once believed that Shakespeare was intimately familiar with ancient Greek tragedies and romances. However, that theory has long been discredited. How then was the great English playwright influenced by ancient Greece?

Simply put, Shakespeare’s plays are suffused with references to ancient Greece. These include direct assimilations of names, characters, and places. One such example is A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Theseus and Hippolyta. This play is set in Greece, including to a large extent in Athens. Yet other examples of Greek influences on Shakespeare’s work pertain to the reincarnation of mythological characters, as is the case with Troilus and Cressida.

Nevertheless, for a long time, there has been debate as to how Shakespeare even came across any of the ancient Greek playwrights, their characters, and the characters of Greek mythology. Many scholars have held that there was no reason to believe Shakespeare ever encountered any of the ancient Greek tragedians either in the original language or translated versions.

There were no English editions of Greek tragedies published during the playwright’s lifetime, and any influence coming from Euripides, Sophocles, or Aeschylus would have been filtered through Classical Latin sources. Those would have been mediated through Renaissance culture.

Throughout the twentieth century, the consensus of scholars came to be that any meaningful contact Shakespeare had had with ancient Greek culture came through Seneca. On the other hand, some academics have argued Shakespeare was directly exposed to ancient Greek texts and thinkers when he was young.

Some scholars claim Shakespeare had to have held a considerable reservoir of knowledge in relation to Greek literature, history, and politics, and he may have even been taught Greek at school.

It has been suggested that the great playwright learned about Greek drama through a translation of Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. Yet others posit that he learned about the concepts of Greek tragedy and culture from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
Regardless of how Shakespeare came to know about ancient Greek culture, influences thereof have certainly made their way into several of his most famous literary works.

Influence of Ancient Greece in Shakespeare’s Plays

In his play Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare reincarnates figures from ancient Greek mythology such as Agamemnon, his brother Menelaus, the Greek commanders Achilles, Ajax, Ulysses, Nestor, Diomedes, and Patroclus. There were also King Priam, the king of Troy, his sons Hector, Troilus, Paris, Deiphobus, Helenus, and Aeneas and Antenor.

The revered beauty Helen, Hector’s wife Andromache, and the unheeded Cassandra are also present in the play.

In the third part of Henry The Sixth, Act 3, Scene 3, the character Duke of Gloucester says “I’ll play the orator as well as Nestor, deceive more slyly than Ulysses could, and, like a Sinon, take another Troy.”

Moreover, in Much Ado About Nothing, Act 2 scene 1, Benedick says of the character Beatrice, “I would not marry her, were she endowed with all that Adam had left him before he transgressed. She would have made Hercules have turned spit.”

There are many more direct mentions of ancient Greek figures in Shakespeare’s plays, including in their titles, as evidenced by Timon of Athens. The real Timon of Athens lived in the city in the fifth century BC alongside Socrates and Pericles.

It is, therefore, clear that ancient Greece, its heroes, villains, philosophers, and mythology permeated a great amount of Shakespeare’s work. Nonetheless, how exactly this came to be and how he even knew about the works of the ancient Greeks remains unclear.