Daniel Swift

A man for all ages

Jonathan Bate gives us Shakespeare the pagan — a devotee of the classics, writing for a post-Reformation England planning its own ‘neo-Roman’ empire

issue 27 April 2019

  • How the Classics Made Shakespeare

    Jonathan Bate

    Princeton, pp. 224

  • This is Shakespeare

    Emma Smith

    Pelican, pp. 349

The deployment of Shakespeare to describe Brexit is by now a cliché. It might take the form of a quotation, be borrowed in a headline, or involve the name of one of the better-known characters; it might turn up in that most hollow of adjectives, Shakespearean. It has two possible modes.

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